council-watts

council-watts is an agent for Claude Code from CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin. It costs 32 tokens per session (1,006 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of council-watts, Apache-2.0.

An AI reviewer modeled on Alan Watts, a philosopher and speaker known for questioning the way problems are framed. It looks for assumptions that may be creating an unnecessary problem and turns useful reframing into action.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for reframing decisions, clarifying whether a problem is genuine, questioning assumptions, and choosing a concrete change in behavior.
Why use it?
It helps teams distinguish real threats from problems caused by an unhelpful viewpoint or metric.

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-watts
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-watts

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-watts.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-watts)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-watts"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/curtisthe/three-pillars-plugin/council-watts.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 1,006 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 94% 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 $0.01006
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00503
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00201
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00101

Measured 5d ago against content hash 8aa8c37638f3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, 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 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

94% identical to council-watts — 15 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-watts.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 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.
  • Project scope: per agents/_shared/project-scope.md — only access files within the current project directory.

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.

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 8aa8c37638f3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council-watts 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 1,006 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to council-watts, differing in 15 lines, and is treated as a copy.