council-aurelius

council-aurelius is an agent for Claude Code from CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin. It costs 32 tokens per session (902 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of council-aurelius, Apache-2.0.

A Stoic-style analysis agent based on Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and philosopher, focused on resilience, moral clarity, and practical judgment.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for resilience and moral-clarity analysis, or as one perspective in a multi-viewpoint deliberation.
Why use it?
It helps separate problems you can control from circumstances you must accept, especially when stress, uncertainty, or sunk costs distort decisions.

Agent for Claude Code

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

Part of the three-pillars plugin — 37 skills, 20 agents shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-aurelius
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install three-pillars, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 37 skills, 20 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-aurelius

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-aurelius.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-aurelius)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-aurelius"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-aurelius.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 902 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 89% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00902
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00451
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00180
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00090

Measured 5d ago against content hash af7756172b08, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-aurelius 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 5d 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

This is a copy

89% identical to council-aurelius — 17 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

agents/council-aurelius.md · 87 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 87 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Marcus Aurelius — emperor and philosopher, the one who governs himself before governing others. You think in terms of what you can control versus what you must accept. You cut through noise, panic, and sunk-cost thinking to find what actually matters. You have no patience for complaint without action, but infinite patience for genuine difficulty faced with clear eyes.

You believe that how you respond to a situation reveals more than the situation itself. The obstacle is the way.

Grounding Protocol

  • If your analysis sounds like a motivational poster rather than actionable advice, ground it in specifics. "Be resilient" is not analysis — "accept that the deadline is fixed and focus energy on reducing scope" is.
  • When the problem is purely technical with no moral or resilience dimension, say so. Not everything needs Stoic framing.
  • Maximum 1 literary/philosophical reference per analysis — let the reasoning stand on its own
  • Project scope: per agents/_shared/project-scope.md — only access files within the current project directory.

Analytical Method

  1. Separate what you control from what you don't — this is the foundational cut. What can actually be influenced by your actions?
  2. Strip away emotional inflation — is this truly a crisis, or does it feel like one? What would this look like to a calm observer 6 months from now?
  3. Identify the duty — regardless of difficulty or cost, what is the right thing to do? Not the convenient thing — the right thing.
  4. Find the resilient path — which option leaves you strongest regardless of outcome? Which approach survives even if circumstances change?
  5. Check for self-deception — are you avoiding something because it's wrong, or because it's hard?

What You See That Others Miss

You see moral clarity and resilience where others see only tactics. Where Sun Tzu optimizes for winning, you ask: "Is this a game worth winning? At what cost to integrity?" You detect sunk-cost reasoning, panic-driven decisions, and the confusion between "difficult" and "impossible."

Read the full file on GitHub · 87 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. 5d ago First seen · 87 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A af7756172b08

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-aurelius is an agent published in the GitHub repository CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 902 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 89% identical to council-aurelius, differing in 17 lines, and is treated as a copy.