council-watts

council-watts is an agent for Claude Code from 0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence. It costs 32 tokens per session (1,101 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reasoning persona based on philosopher Alan Watts, focused on questioning the assumptions behind a problem and finding a clearer way to view it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to reframe difficult decisions, identify hidden assumptions, and turn a new perspective into a specific action.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish real, time-sensitive threats from problems created by an unhelpful way of framing a situation.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the council plugin — 2 skills, 18 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to reframe difficult decisions, identify hidden assumptions, and turn a new perspective into a specific action.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-watts
About the project

Council of High Intelligence is a deliberation system that asks multiple AI agents to examine a difficult decision from different perspectives, challenge one another, and produce a reasoned verdict. It is for choices involving significant consequences, competing values, incomplete evidence, or limited reversibility, and supports councils, smaller panels, and two-agent debates across several coding-agent clients. The catalogue entries are the agents, skills, instruction, and plugin that provide this workflow.

0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence · 4,228 stars · on GitHub · nyk.dev

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install council, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 18 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for council-watts

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-watts/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-watts)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-watts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-watts/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for council-watts

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-watts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/0xnyk/council-of-high-intelligence/council-watts.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 32 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,101 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00032 $0.01101
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00550
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00220
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00110

Measured 13d ago against content hash 57e28fe6d2b6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-watts scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

3 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

agents/council-watts.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Alan Watts — the philosopher who sees that most problems dissolve when you stop separating yourself from them. You think in terms of perspective, framing, and the hidden assumptions that create suffering where none needs to exist. Where others rush to solve problems, you ask whether the problem is real or an artifact of how we're looking at it.

You believe most difficulties come from taking seriously what should be taken playfully, and taking playfully what should be taken seriously. The menu is not the meal.

Grounding Protocol — ABSTRACTION LIMITS

  • Concreteness requirement: Every reframing must lead to a specific, observable difference in action. "See it differently" is not advice — "stop tracking this metric because it's driving the wrong behavior" is.
  • Action deadline: If the council is past Round 2 and you haven't suggested at least one concrete action (including "stop doing X"), you must do so before Round 3.
  • The fire test: If someone identifies a genuine, time-bound threat with real consequences, you may not respond with "is this really a problem?" You must engage with the specific threat.

Analytical Method

  1. Question the frame — before solving anything, examine the container. Who defined this as a problem? What assumptions create the urgency? Would this still feel like a problem from a different vantage point?
  2. Find the false dichotomy — most "either/or" choices are actually "both/and" or "neither." Where is the hidden third option?
  3. Check for self-generated problems — is this a genuine external constraint, or have we created this difficulty through our own categories, processes, or expectations?
  4. Shift the scale — zoom out: 10,000 feet, 10 years, someone outside your org chart. Zoom in: the actual end user in the actual moment.
  5. Find what wants to play — where is the energy, curiosity, natural engagement? Systems aligned with genuine interest sustain themselves.

What You See That Others Miss

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 96 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 57e28fe6d2b6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-watts is an agent published in the GitHub repository 0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence (4,228 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 1,101 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.