Council

Council

Council is an optional judgment strategy, not a lifecycle or delivery gate. Use

it when one fresh validator is insufficient for a named irreversible,

high-blast-radius, or genuinely contested decision. Do not convene a council for

a routine or reversible decision that a single fresh validator can settle: the

cost of independent contexts is warranted only by a named one-way door.

• Freeze one question, acceptance surface, evidence set, and subject digest.
• Give each judge an independent context and the same bounded packet.
• Require each judge to cite evidence, disclose omissions, and return its own

judgment without seeing other answers first.

• Synthesize agreement and disagreement without majority laundering. Preserve

minority evidence and unresolved assumptions.

• Write council-report.v1 and return it to the caller.

Methodology-weighted agreement

Agreement across differing evidence methodologies counts more than agreement

within one. Record each judge's evidence methodology (for example: static

reading, executing the subject, tracing history) alongside its judgment. A

consensus claim must name at least two distinct methodologies among its

supporting judges; otherwise report it as single-method agreement and weight

it as one confirmation, however many judges share it. The named failure mode

is echo consensus: unanimous judgment produced from identical inputs by one

shared method, laundered as independent confirmation.

Model-diversity axis

When the caller pins judges to model profiles, record each judge's

model_identity beside its methodology and context ID (see

the agent-native model-dispatch recipe).

Cross-model agreement is an additional diversity axis: single-model unanimity

is weighted as one confirmation with the same anti-echo-consensus rationale,

regardless of how many judges share that model. If a requested profile has no

live adapter, disclose diversity_unsatisfied on the report and continue

single-model — never silently, never via claude -p.

Fresh sessions per round

Every judging round uses fresh judge contexts with new context IDs, distinct

from the author, the synthesizer, and every prior round. A judge that has

seen another judge's answer, or its own prior-round answer, is no longer

independent: exclude its judgment from agreement counting and admit it only

as labeled commentary. Reused or colliding context IDs are a checkable stop

condition — repair the isolation or report the round as non-independent.

Synthesis section

The report ends with an explicit consensus/divergence synthesis: consensus

points with their methodology spread, divergence points with each side's

cited evidence, minority findings preserved in their own words, and

unresolved assumptions. Synthesis is complete when every judge finding lands

in exactly one of those buckets; a finding silently dropped from synthesis is

majority laundering.

Output

• Artifact directory: .agents/scratch/council/<run-id>/.
• Filename: council-report.json.
• Format: council-report.v1 JSON — the frozen question and subject digest,

every judge's context ID, evidence methodology, cited evidence, and disclosed

omissions, plus the consensus/divergence/minority/unresolved synthesis. It

carries no verdict, readiness, or PASS field; the validator rejects one.

• Validation command:

skills/council/scripts/validate-output.sh <council-report.json>.

A judge that times out, errors, or returns an evidence-free judgment is excluded

from agreement counting and recorded as non-returning; if fewer than two

independent judgments remain, report the round as insufficient rather than

synthesize a thin consensus.

Boundary

Council does not mint a verdict of any version — no PASS/FAIL/NOT_PROVEN,

no verdict.v* — edit the subject, retry work, choose a next action, or

authorize Git, closure, release, or delivery. When Council is used as a Validate

strategy, one accountable fresh validator consumes its report and Validate

remains the sole semantic result owner and the only optional verdict.v2

writer.