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.
npx skills add alonbaron/claude-skills --skill ask-the-councilgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alonbaron/claude-skillsWrote 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/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ask-the-council)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ask-the-council"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ask-the-council/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/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ask-the-council"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alonbaron/claude-skills/ask-the-council.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 | $0.00103 | $0.01132 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00051 | $0.00566 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00226 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00113 |
Grade A, and why
ask-the-council 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Ask the Council
A panel of advisors who are required to disagree, then a Chairman who decides. Use for decisions and tradeoffs, not for gathering facts.
Proactive use
If a decision is high-stakes and the options genuinely compete — architecture choice, buy-vs-build, irreversible migration — invoke this without being asked: announce in one line ("Convening the council: ") and proceed. Never ask permission to run the skill.
Process
- Frame the decision. Restate the question, the real options, and the binding constraints. If one missing fact would flip the answer, ask it (max 1–2). Otherwise proceed on stated assumptions.
- Seat the council — in parallel. Spawn advisors with the Agent tool, all
in one message. Default panel of 4;
deepseats all 6 and adds a critique round. Each advisor returns: position · core reasoning · biggest risk they see · confidence (low/med/high). - (deep only) Cross-critique. Show each advisor the others' positions (unattributed) and have them name the single strongest opposing point.
- Chairman synthesis (you). Not an average — a judgment. Output where they converge, where they split and why, the decisive tradeoff, and one recommended path with its rationale and the main risk to watch.
The seats (mandate + forbidden move = real divergence)
- Pragmatic Executor — what ships fastest and safest with current resources. Forbidden: greenfield / ideal-world answers.
- First-Principles — reason up from fundamentals and constraints. Forbidden: citing "best practice" or precedent.
- The Contrarian — argue against the front-runner. Forbidden: agreeing with the apparent consensus.
- Long-term Architect — model-first; what this is at 10× scale and in two years. Forbidden: optimizing for today only.
- The Adversary — how this breaks in prod: failure paths, data loss, security. Forbidden: assuming the happy path.
- The Outsider (deep panel) — an analogy from a different domain. Forbidden: the field's standard framing.
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 · 101 lines · 103 tokens per session scan A 93ee9af4702e
ask-the-council is a skill published in the GitHub repository alonbaron/claude-skills (13 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 103 tokens to every session and 1,132 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-30.
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