tribunal

tribunal is a command for Claude Code from aaronbassett/agent-foundry. It costs 40 tokens per session (1,306 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured decision process for comparing multiple important options before making a hard-to-reverse choice. It uses fact-finding, parallel advocates, rebuttals, judge questions, and repeated review rounds.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for choices such as architecture changes, migrations, vendor selection, hiring, or other decisions with long-lasting consequences.
Why use it?
It gives major decisions a more thorough examination of evidence, trade-offs, and objections before commitment.

Command for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the decision-making plugin — 1 skill, 7 commands, 2 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 commands/aaronbassett/agent-foundry/tribunal
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aaronbassett/agent-foundry

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install decision-making, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 7 commands, 2 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 tribunal

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/aaronbassett/agent-foundry/tribunal.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/aaronbassett/agent-foundry/tribunal)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/aaronbassett/agent-foundry/tribunal"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/aaronbassett/agent-foundry/tribunal.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,306 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.00040 $0.01306
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00653
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00261
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00131

Measured 5d ago against content hash dfc65020f5cb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tribunal 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.

plugins/decision-making/commands/tribunal.md · 104 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 104 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/decision-making:tribunal

When to use

Use tribunal when you have N≥2 concrete options on the table, the decision is load-bearing and hard to reverse, and you want rigorous deliberation — including rebuttals, judge questions, and a pre-judgment disclosure — before committing. Tribunal is heavier than other techniques in the plugin because it spawns parallel advocates, runs multiple rounds, and interrogates its own conclusions. Pay that cost only when the decision warrants it.

Escalate from adversarial to tribunal when the stakes justify the extra cost: irreversible migrations, architecture choices that lock in future work, hiring and team-shape decisions, vendor lock-in, or anything you will have to live with for a long time. Tribunal is the only technique in v1 that offers an honest "unable to decide" escape hatch — if the options are genuinely equivalent, or if the decision depends on information you do not have, the tribunal can and should say so rather than fabricating a verdict.

Cost tier

High. Up to 10 rounds × N advocates × opus model + fact-finding phase. Gate behind a condition when referencing from plan steps. See references/cost-tiers.md.

Input

A decision description and optional list of options. If options are unclear, enter fact-finding and ask 3-5 clarifying questions before spawning advocates.

Workflow

  1. Parse the decision — identify what is being decided, what the options are (minimum 2, no maximum), what criteria matter, and what context is relevant. If options are unclear, ask the user to enumerate them explicitly and confirm you have understood. Output: a clear list of N options to deliberate.

  2. Fact-finding — probe for constraints (budget, timeline, technical limitations), context (why now, what prompted it), history (what has been tried, what has been ruled out), stakeholders (who else is affected, what are their preferences), non-negotiables (must-haves vs nice-to-haves), and success criteria (how will you know the decision was correct). Ask 3-5 clarifying questions. Conclude fact-finding when you understand the decision's importance and urgency, know the key constraints advocates must work within, and could explain the decision context to a colleague. More than 10 questions suggests the decision isn't ready for deliberation.

Read the full file on GitHub · 104 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 · 104 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A dfc65020f5cb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tribunal is a command published in the GitHub repository aaronbassett/agent-foundry (4 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 1,306 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.