Debate agents

Skill hungv47/meta-skills/skills/meta/debate-agents

Runs a problem through multiple expert perspectives via debate (agents argue in rounds and converge) or poll (agents analyze independently, then aggregate by consensus). Use to pressure-test a decision or trade-off with no clear winner. Standalone, or invoked by another skill as a sub-routine. Not for implementation (use architect-system) or code verification (use review-work).From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add hungv47/meta-skills --skill debate-agents

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

14 stars14 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

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Agent Room — Stochastic Multi-Agent Discussion

Meta — Multi-perspective panel. Spawns expert agents with distinct stances, surfaces real tradeoffs on high-stakes decisions with no clear winner, recommends a path with reasoning. Standalone or sub-routine.

Core Question: "What do multiple perspectives converge on — and where do they genuinely disagree?"

Why this skill, methodology, principles, when NOT to use, constraint-vs-perspective assignment: references/playbook.md [PLAYBOOK].

Critical Gates

Right mode — debate for trade-offs; poll for filtering hallucinations / finding consensus. Default debate.
Specific problem — Cold Start before spawning if vague. Don't spawn into ambiguity.
Structured output — POSITION/REASONING/PROPOSAL/CONCERNS (debate); ranking/recommendation/binary/scoring (poll). Freeform prose can't be aggregated.
Cost — debate 3×3 ≈ $0.30-0.50; poll 10 ≈ $0.30-0.50. Default sonnet; opus ~10× and requires explicit request.

Quality Gate

Synthesis must name real tradeoffs (not collapse to consensus), surface where stances genuinely disagree, recommend an action + reversibility cost, flag unresolved risks honestly (status → DONE_WITH_CONCERNS if no convergence). Critic auto-fails synthesis that manufactures consensus, hides outliers, or forces a tiebreaker.

Before Starting

Apply references/_shared/before-starting-check.md [PLAYBOOK]. Step 0 — Mode resolution: load references/_shared/mode-resolver.md [PROCEDURE]; standard default; auto-downgrade ≤3-sentence single-decision → fast (debate 2×2 / poll 5×1). --fast does NOT skip structured-output or early-convergence detection. Sub-routine invocations skip steps 1+2 — caller owns problem framing and context. No experience/ read — each invocation is fresh. Session execution profile (single-vs-multi): inherit per references/_shared/execution-policy.md.

Pre-Dispatch

Entry points (standalone vs sub-routine), Warm/Cold Start prompts, sub-routine protocol: references/procedures/pre-dispatch.md [PROCEDURE].

Decision Tree

Mode routing keywords, debate path (A1–A4), poll path (B1–B5), config table, edge cases, costs: references/decision-tree.md [PROCEDURE]. Step prompts in references/procedures/debate.md and references/procedures/poll.md.

Artifact Contract

Path (standalone): docs/forsvn/artifacts/meta-debate-agents-[YYYY-MM-DD]-<slug>.md (flat v2; dated; immutable per-run)
Path (sub-routine): none — inline synthesis to caller
Lifecycle: decision (audit trail; never overwritten)
Frontmatter: skill, produced_by, version, date, status, stack (=meta), review_surface (html standalone / none sub-routine), decision_state, review_tool, reviewed_at, reviewer, mode, agents, rounds (debate only), provenance
Sections (debate): Participants / Consensus / Key Disagreements / Recommended Action / Unresolved Risks / Debate Highlights
Sections (poll): Consensus / Divergences / Outliers / Raw Data / High-Variance Flags
Consumed by: operator (decision audit trail). No machine consumer in v1.

Full frontmatter + report bodies (debate + poll) + slug convention: references/report-template.md [PROCEDURE].

Anti-Patterns

references/anti-patterns.md [ANTI-PATTERN] — re-read before spawning into vague problems, claiming consensus that didn't emerge, forcing a tiebreaker, or writing a sub-routine result to disk.

Durable Rules (protected)

Completion Status

DONE — debate converged, OR poll yielded clear synthesis
DONE_WITH_CONCERNS — unresolved disagreement / split; flagged under Unresolved Risks / Divergences
BLOCKED — agents couldn't engage (under-specified after Cold Start, scope unclear, rounds exhausted)
NEEDS_CONTEXT — needs upstream artifact (spec, ICP, architecture); sub-routine returns to caller with what's missing

Next Step

Standalone: operator reviews dated file (Roughdraft / HTML preview), records decision_state. Sub-routine: integrate recommendation into caller's flow.

Chain Position

Standalone or sub-routine. Typical sub-routine callers: prioritize, architect-system, discover.

Worked Example

references/examples/debate-walkthrough.md [EXAMPLE] — 3-agent debate, mind-change, early convergence.

References

references/playbook.md [PLAYBOOK], references/decision-tree.md [PROCEDURE], references/report-template.md [PROCEDURE], references/anti-patterns.md [ANTI-PATTERN]
references/procedures/{pre-dispatch, debate, poll}.md [PROCEDURE]
references/examples/debate-walkthrough.md [EXAMPLE]
references/_shared/{before-starting-check, mode-resolver, pre-dispatch-protocol}.md