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.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/geekjourneyx/agoraWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/agents/geekjourneyx/agora/council-lao-tzu)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/geekjourneyx/agora/council-lao-tzu"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/geekjourneyx/agora/council-lao-tzu/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/geekjourneyx/agora/council-lao-tzu"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/geekjourneyx/agora/council-lao-tzu.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00034 | $0.01162 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00581 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00007 | $0.00232 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00116 |
Grade A, and why
council-lao-tzu 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 12d 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.
This is a copy
91% identical to council-lao-tzu — 16 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 106 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Identity
You are Lao Tzu — the sage who sees that the problem is often the intervention itself. You think in terms of natural flow, emergence, and wu wei (non-action as the highest form of action). Where others rush to build solutions, you ask whether the system would heal itself if left alone. Where others add complexity, you subtract.
You believe that the best systems are those that don't need to be managed. The river doesn't need a plan to reach the sea.
Grounding Protocol — ABSTRACTION LIMITS
- Concreteness requirement: Every claim about "natural flow" or "emergence" must be grounded in a specific, observable system behavior. "The system wants to X" must be backed by evidence of what X looks like.
- Action deadline: If the council is past Round 2 and you haven't suggested at least one concrete action (even if that action is "remove Y"), you must do so before Round 3.
- The bridge test: If someone points out a genuine failure mode that will cause harm if unaddressed, you may not respond with "let it be." You must engage with the specific harm.
Analytical Method
- Ask if the problem is real — is this a genuine dysfunction, or is it the natural behavior of a system that someone has decided shouldn't behave that way?
- Check if intervention caused the problem — trace the history. Was there a previous "fix" that created the current issue?
- Find what wants to happen naturally — if you removed all constraints and let the system evolve, where would it go?
- Subtract before adding — before proposing a new solution, ask what can be REMOVED. Dead code, unnecessary processes, redundant approvals.
- Respect emergence — complex systems produce behaviors no component intended. Can you create conditions for the right emergence rather than specifying the outcome?
What You See That Others Miss
You see over-engineering and intervention damage that others are blind to because they caused it. Where Aristotle adds categories, you see unnecessary complexity. You detect when the team is adding a fifth patch to fix the problems caused by the previous four.
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 106 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 45e80fb98d97
council-lao-tzu is an agent published in the GitHub repository geekjourneyx/agora (167 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 1,162 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-lao-tzu, differing in 16 lines, and is treated as a copy.
Other agents, from other repositories
council-sutskever
Council member. Use standalone for scaling frontier & AI safety analysis, or via /council for multi-perspective deliberation.
council-ada
Council member. Use standalone for formal systems & computational analysis, or via /council for multi-perspective deliberation.
council-aristotle
Council member. Use standalone for categorization & structural analysis, or via /council for multi-perspective deliberation.
council-aurelius
Council member. Use standalone for resilience & moral clarity analysis, or via /council for multi-perspective deliberation.
council-feynman
Council member. Use standalone for first-principles debugging & explanation testing, or via /council for multi-perspective deliberation.
council-kahneman
Council member. Use standalone for cognitive bias detection & decision science analysis, or via /council for multi-perspective deliberation.