council

council is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from epicsagas/epic-harness. It costs 55 tokens per session (830 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A four-perspective discussion process for architecture, technology, and design choices. It asks an architect, skeptic, pragmatist, and critic to examine the decision from different angles before recording it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when choosing technologies, comparing architectures, or making a significant design decision without an obvious answer.
Why use it?
It exposes trade-offs, simpler alternatives, edge cases, and delivery risks that one viewpoint might miss.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the epic plugin — 27 skills, 6 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when choosing technologies, comparing architectures, or making a significant design decision without an obvious answer.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/epicsagas/epic-harness/council
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.

Any agent
npx skills add epicsagas/epic-harness --skill council
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/epicsagas/epic-harness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install epic, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills, 6 hooks.

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/epicsagas/epic-harness/council/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/epicsagas/epic-harness/council)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/epicsagas/epic-harness/council"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/epicsagas/epic-harness/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for council

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/epicsagas/epic-harness/council"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/epicsagas/epic-harness/council.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 830 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00055 $0.00830
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00415
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00166
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00083

Measured 9d ago against content hash ba506221c1c1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 9d 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.

skills/council/SKILL.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Council — Structured Multi-Voice Decision Making

Iron Law

NO MAJOR DECISION WITHOUT AT LEAST TWO OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS.

When to Trigger

  • Architecture choices (monolith vs microservice, SQL vs NoSQL)
  • Technology selection (framework, library, language)
  • Design decisions with no clear right answer
  • Trade-offs between competing requirements (speed vs quality, security vs usability)
  • User explicitly requests deliberation

Process

1. Identify the Decision

State the decision in one clear question. Example: "Should we use WebSockets or SSE for real-time updates?"

2. Summon 4 Voices (Parallel)

Launch 4 independent subagents using the Agent tool, each with ONLY the question and relevant context (NOT the full conversation history — this prevents anchoring bias):

Voice Role Focus
Architect Long-term correctness Maintainability, extensibility, architectural alignment
Skeptic Challenge assumptions Simpler alternatives, hidden costs, "what if we don't?"
Pragmatist Ship it now Timeline, user impact, operational complexity, team skills
Critic Find the cracks Edge cases, failure modes, migration risks, rollback difficulty

Anti-Anchoring Rule: Each voice receives only:

  • The decision question
  • Relevant codebase context (file paths, current architecture)
  • Their role and focus area They do NOT receive: the full conversation, other voices' opinions, or the user's leaning.

3. Synthesize

After all 4 voices report back:

  1. List areas of agreement (strong signal)
  2. List areas of disagreement (where trade-offs live)
  3. Present the user with:
    • Recommended option (based on agreement weight)
    • Key trade-off (the real decision to make)
    • Reversibility (how hard to undo each option)

4. Record Decision

Save the decision to memory:

epic mem add \
  --title "Decision: {question}" \
  --type decision \
  --importance 0.9 \
  --body "Context: ...\nOptions: ...\nChosen: ...\nRationale: ...\nTrade-off accepted: ..."

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 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. 9d ago First seen · 83 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A ba506221c1c1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

council is a skill published in the GitHub repository epicsagas/epic-harness (18 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 830 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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