explainx / blog
Council of High Intelligence v1.1.0 runs 18 intellectual personas — Aristotle, Feynman, Kahneman, Torvalds — across Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama with /council in Claude Code. Full, quick, and duo modes with anti-groupthink gates.
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One week ago "loop engineering" was a term most developers hadn't heard. Today it is trending across X with 2,200+ posts, championed by Anthropic's Boris Cherny and OpenAI's Peter Steinberger, critiqued by Matt Pocock, and joked about by everyone who has watched Claude say "You're right to push back! I over-engineered this!" 87 times in a row. Here is the full picture.
One frontier model answering "Should we open-source our agent framework?" gives you one fluent opinion dressed as certainty.
Council of High Intelligence (~2.8k GitHub stars, v1.1.0) runs the opposite play: 18 intellectual personas — Aristotle, Socrates, Feynman, Kahneman, Torvalds, Taleb, Munger — deliberate across multiple LLM providers and return a verdict that leads with what they cannot resolve.
One command in Claude Code: /council.
| Repo | 0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence |
| License | CC0 (public domain dedication) |
| Members | 18 council agents with polarity pairs |
| Command | /council [question] in Claude Code or Codex |
| Modes | Full (3 rounds) · Quick (--quick) · Duo (--duo) |
| Providers | Auto: Claude, Codex, Gemini, Ollama, NVIDIA NIM, Cursor CLI |
| Install | ./install.sh (Claude) · ./install.sh --codex |
| Latest | v1.1.0 — weighted tie-breaking tally (May 2026) |
| Single LLM | Council |
|---|---|
| One reasoning path | 3–18 independent analyses |
| Hidden disagreement | Cross-examination round |
| Confident wrong answers | Problem Restate Gate — reframes question before analysis |
| Consensus theater | Dissent quotas — steelman opposing views if over 70% agree early |
| Answers everything | Verdict opens with Unresolved Questions |
The design targets architecture decisions, open-source vs proprietary, pricing models, acquisition offers, and build vs buy — questions where being wrong is expensive.
Compare to OpenRouter Fusion, which ensembles frontier models in the cloud for research. Council is local skill orchestration in Claude Code with persona-specific system prompts and deliberation protocol enforcement.
Each member is a Claude Code subagent with a named intellectual tradition:
| Agent | Figure | Domain | Polarity |
|---|---|---|---|
council-aristotle | Aristotle | Categorization | Classifies everything |
council-socrates | Socrates | Assumption destruction | Questions everything |
council-feynman | Feynman | First principles | Refuses unexplained complexity |
council-torvalds | Linus Torvalds | Pragmatic engineering | Ship it or shut up |
council-kahneman | Daniel Kahneman | Cognitive bias | Your thinking is the first error |
council-taleb | Nassim Taleb | Tail risk | Design for the tail |
council-munger | Charlie Munger | Inversion | What guarantees failure? |
council-meadows | Donella Meadows | Systems thinking | Fix the system, not the symptom |
| … | Musashi, Machiavelli, Lao Tzu, Watts, Karpathy, Sutskever, Ada, Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Rams | … | … |
Polarity pairs are deliberate counterweights — e.g. Socrates destroys assumptions while Feynman rebuilds from first principles. Duo mode pairs them directly.
Default model tiers per member (opus vs sonnet) balance cost and depth; auto-routing spreads members across providers when Codex, Gemini, or Ollama are installed.
Three rounds: independent analysis → cross-examination → final positions, then verdict synthesis.
/council Should we open-source our agent framework?
/council --triad strategy What's our competitive moat?
Two rounds — no cross-examination. For smaller calls:
/council --quick Should we add caching here?
Two-member dialectic via polarity pairs:
/council --duo Should we use microservices or monolith?
/council --duo --members torvalds,ada Is this abstraction worth it?
20 predefined triads bundle three members for domains like strategy, shipping, and safety.
The council detects installed providers and assigns members without manual YAML (unless you override):
| Provider | Detection | Exec |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude) | native | subagent |
| OpenAI | Codex CLI | codex exec |
| Gemini CLI | gemini -p | |
| Ollama | local | ollama run |
| NVIDIA NIM | NVIDIA_API_KEY | OpenAI-compatible API |
| Cursor | cursor-agent | headless ask mode |
Hard rule: polarity pairs land on different providers when possible — so Socrates and Feynman aren't the same model wearing different hats.
Flags:
--dry-route — print routing table without running--no-auto-route — Claude-only--models path/to/yaml — manual seat allocationUseful alongside OmniRoute if you want local gateway fallback while council members hit different upstream models.
v1.1.0 improved tie-breaking — counted weighted tally instead of prose impression.
git clone https://github.com/0xNyk/council-of-high-intelligence.git
cd council-of-high-intelligence
./install.sh # Claude Code
./install.sh --codex # Claude + Codex skills
Restart Claude Code, then:
/council Should we accept this acquisition offer?
/council --quick Should we release today?
/council --duo monolith vs microservices for our stage?
Validation: ./scripts/council-simulation-checklist.sh · Demo pack in repo.
Requirements: Claude Code CLI (or Codex for Codex skill). Optional: Codex, Gemini CLI, Ollama, Cursor CLI, NVIDIA API key for multi-provider diversity.
| Tool | Best for |
|---|---|
| Council | Strategic decisions, architecture, product tradeoffs, pre-mortems |
| OpenRouter Fusion | Deep research with web search + multi-model judge |
| OmniRoute | Routing coding traffic across 231 providers + compression |
| Loop engineering | Autonomous implementation loops, not deliberation |
| Single Fable 5 session | Shipping code fast — not boardroom debate |
Council is decision infrastructure, not a replacement for coding agents.
--quick, --duo, or --triad