Council

Council

Use this skill to gather independent advice from a named group of advisor skills, then synthesize the results for the user.

Membership Convention

Advisor skills join councils with this Agent Skills metadata key:

metadata:
  agentic-council.councils: "product,design"

Council names are comma-separated, trimmed, and matched case-insensitively.

Usage

The user-facing form is:

/council [NAME] [PROMPT]

Interpret [NAME] as the council name and [PROMPT] as the task to send to each advisor.

Discovery

Discover advisors by scanning installed skill roots for SKILL.md files whose frontmatter includes the agentic-council.councils key under metadata.

Use scripts/discover-council-members.sh when shell access is available:

scripts/discover-council-members.sh product /path/to/skills /another/skills/root

The script prints matching advisors as JSONL with name, path, and description.

If no advisors match, tell the user no council members were found for the requested name and show the metadata convention needed to join that council.

Delegation

For full council behavior, use host-native fresh subagents, isolated sessions, or equivalent delegation. Spawn one advisor per matching skill.

Each advisor must receive:

• the original user prompt;
• the advisor skill's path or activated instructions.

Do not share one advisor's output with another advisor before synthesis.

If the host cannot create fresh subagents or isolated sessions, explain that full fresh-context council mode is unavailable. You may offer a clearly labeled single-context fallback, but do not present it as fresh-context council output.

Advisor Prompt

Use a prompt like this for each advisor:

Use the skill at [SKILL_PATH] to answer the user's request.

User request:
[PROMPT]

Return your best response.

Synthesis

Adapt the final response shape to the user's task. Do not force a fixed template.

Always preserve:

• which advisor skills were consulted;
• citations or clear references to the individual advisor responses that support the synthesis;
• meaningful consensus;
• important disagreements;
• notable minority views;
• assumptions and missing information;
• a clear recommendation or next step when the prompt calls for one.