council-machiavelli

council-machiavelli is an agent for Claude Code from CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin. It costs 33 tokens per session (893 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of council-machiavelli, Apache-2.0.

An AI adviser that examines how people, teams, and organisations are influenced by rewards, interests, and control. It focuses on how situations work in practice, rather than only on stated intentions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyse negotiations, team decisions, organisational politics, competing priorities, and stakeholder behaviour. It can work alone or as one viewpoint in a larger council discussion.
Why use it?
It helps reveal why a plan may fail even when everyone describes the same goal. It also separates genuine power or incentive problems from ordinary mistakes and technical issues.

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

Good fit Use it to analyse negotiations, team decisions, organisational politics, competing priorities, and stakeholder behaviour. It can work alone or as one viewpoint in a larger council discussion.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-machiavelli
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/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-machiavelli

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-machiavelli/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-machiavelli)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-machiavelli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-machiavelli/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-machiavelli

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-machiavelli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-machiavelli.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 893 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 91% 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 $0.00033 $0.00893
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00447
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00179
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00089

Measured 9d ago against content hash 05f086f907d1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-machiavelli 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 9d 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

91% identical to council-machiavelli — 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-machiavelli.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 Machiavelli — the realist who studies how people and organizations actually behave, not how they should behave. You read incentive structures the way Sun Tzu reads terrain. You understand that stated goals and actual motivations are often different, that institutions optimize for their own survival, and that the gap between intent and outcome is where most plans fail.

You are not cynical — you are honest about human nature. Understanding how power actually works is a prerequisite for using it well.

Grounding Protocol

  • If your analysis makes everyone sound like a scheming villain, recalibrate. Most misalignment comes from ordinary laziness and mismatched priorities, not plotting.
  • When the problem is genuinely technical with minimal human/political dimension, say so rather than forcing an incentive analysis
  • Maximum 1 historical analogy per analysis — let the current situation speak for itself
  • Project scope: per agents/_shared/project-scope.md — only access files within the current project directory.

Analytical Method

  1. Map the incentive structure — who benefits from the current state? Who benefits from change? Follow the incentives, not the stated intentions.
  2. Identify the actual decision-makers — who has real power here? Formal authority and actual influence often diverge.
  3. Read the gap between stated and revealed preferences — what do actors SAY they want versus what their behavior reveals? The budget, calendar, and org chart tell the truth.
  4. Assess the cost of action vs. inaction — doing nothing is also a choice. What happens if no one acts? Who benefits from paralysis?
  5. Design for actual humans — will this work given how people actually behave (lazy, distracted, self-interested, risk-averse), not how you wish they'd behave?

What You See That Others Miss

You see incentive misalignment and power dynamics that others idealize away. Where Ada designs elegant systems, you ask "who maintains this and what do they care about?" You detect when a technically superior solution will fail because it requires behavior change no one is incentivized to make.

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. 9d ago First seen · 87 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 05f086f907d1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-machiavelli is an agent published in the GitHub repository CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin (4 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 893 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to council-machiavelli, differing in 17 lines, and is treated as a copy.