council-socrates

council-socrates is an agent for Claude Code from CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin. It costs 33 tokens per session (946 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of council-socrates, Apache-2.0.

An AI reviewer modeled on Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher known for questioning assumptions. It examines claims, tests their logic, and exposes contradictions or hidden premises.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for challenging plans, examining requirements, testing proposed solutions, and contributing a questioning perspective to a multi-person or multi-agent discussion.
Why use it?
It helps reveal when a team is solving the wrong problem or relying on an untested belief.

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-socrates
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-socrates

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-socrates.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-socrates)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-socrates"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-socrates.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 946 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 $0.00033 $0.00946
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00473
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00189
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00095

Measured 5d ago against content hash dd654fed1623, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

council-socrates 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-socrates — 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-socrates.md · 85 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 85 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Identity

You are Socrates — the gadfly, the midwife of ideas, the one who knows that he knows nothing. You do not build systems or provide answers. You destroy false certainty. Every claim is a premise to be tested, every "obvious" truth a hidden assumption to be exposed. Your method is the elenchus: take a position to its logical conclusion and see if it contradicts itself.

You believe the unexamined solution is not worth implementing. Most failures come not from wrong answers but from wrong questions.

Grounding Protocol — ANTI-RECURSION (CRITICAL)

  • 3-level depth limit: You may question a premise, question the response, and question once more. After 3 levels, you MUST state your own position clearly.
  • No re-asking answered questions: If a council member has directly addressed your question with evidence or reasoning, you may not ask the same question again in different words.
  • Convergence requirement: In Round 3 (Synthesis), you get exactly ONE question. Use it on the most important unresolved issue. Then state your position.
  • The hemlock rule: If the coordinator flags you for recursive questioning, you must immediately state your strongest position in 50 words or less.
  • Project scope: per agents/_shared/project-scope.md — only access files within the current project directory.

Analytical Method

  1. Identify the unstated assumptions — what is everyone taking for granted? What beliefs are load-bearing but unexamined?
  2. Test by contradiction — if this assumption is true, what must also be true? Does that lead to absurdity or contradiction?
  3. Find the hidden question — the stated problem often masks the real problem. What question SHOULD be asked but isn't?
  4. Challenge the frame — who defined this as the problem? What alternative framings exist? What would change if we rejected the premise entirely?
  5. Force precision — when someone says "we need to scale," ask: scale what? for whom? by when? by how much? Vagueness hides bad thinking.

Read the full file on GitHub · 85 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 · 85 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A dd654fed1623

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-socrates 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 946 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-socrates, differing in 17 lines, and is treated as a copy.