microsoft/councilify

Councilify

Produce a NEW, invocable council for a domain: a context: fork concierge orchestrator over a bench of orthogonal lenses, following the proven /council → /design-council pattern. Reuse before you build; build lenses only where a real, distinct load-bearing question is missing.

Success artifact: a council bundle that, in a FRESH session, convenes on a realistic target — prints a roster manifest, loads every rostered lens (cold, independent), returns {PASS|CONCERN|FAIL|N/A} verdicts, and surfaces standing dissent — with every NEW lens grounded in real evidence and proven to steer.

Inputs

• $ARGUMENTS: the domain to build a council for (e.g. "product development", "security review", "performance"). Optionally: pointers to evidence/archetypes, a target-class hint, and a preferred bundle home.

Core Principles

• Reuse beats build. A lens that already owns an axis is composed in by reference across bundle boundaries (the ROB-from-made-support precedent), never copied. Building a lens whose question equals an existing lens's is the failure this skill exists to prevent.
• One question per lens, from evidence. Every lens owns exactly ONE load-bearing question, mined from a real person/archetype per personafy — never invented from vibes. If a candidate's question collapses into an existing lens's, it is not a lens. Cut it.
• No anthropomorphizing beyond a distinct voice. A lens is a review perspective with a recognizable voice and discipline, not a fictional character with a backstory. Voice serves steering; lore does not.
• Councils are complementary, not duplicative. A new council must review a distinct target class at a distinct stage. Sharing a lens across councils is fine; two councils doing the same job is not.

Steps

1. Study the pattern

Read the reference implementations in full: council/SKILL.md, council-here/SKILL.md, and design-council/SKILL.md + two of its lens skills (e.g. originality-critic, purpose-keeper). Extract: the phase-by-phase orchestration (roster → optional neutral digest → cold fan-out → debate-to-consensus → synthesize), the trust guardrails (roster manifest first, attributed quotes, never downgrade a FAIL, keep FAIL≠N/A), UNAVAILABLE vs ERRORED handling, and the council-native lens template (Load-Bearing Question / Grounding / Tone / Core Behaviors / Verdict Protocol / Tension With). Note the phase-numbering difference between the two: council has 5 phases (Guard Check, Roster, repo-digest, fan-out, debate, synthesize) because it supports a repo-crawl pre-digest; design-council has 4 phases (no pre-digest — targets always pass directly) because every target is a single self-contained design artifact.

Success criteria: You can restate the orchestrator's phases and the lens template from memory, and name why council-here is inline while council forks.

2. Derive the domain's ideal roster — BLIND to the existing inventory first

Name the domain's target class (what artifact does this council review?) and stage (when in the lifecycle?). Then derive, independently of what already exists, the distinct perspectives that domain genuinely demands — mining real domain-leadership archetypes for each. For each candidate: one load-bearing question, the archetype/framework it's grounded in, and a one-line voice.

Do this before looking at the installed skill inventory. Naming what already exists first biases the derivation toward "what we have" instead of "what the domain actually needs" — the two can look similar, but a roster built the second way is more likely to contain the ideal makeup rather than a locally-convenient one.

• Execution: Delegate parallel model_role="research" agents to gather archetype evidence per candidate lens; each writes findings to disk, returns a thin summary. Explicitly instruct each research agent NOT to consult or let its own visible skill list bias which perspectives it proposes — derive from the domain's real leadership archetypes and literature, not from what happens to already be installed.

Honest limitation, stated plainly (verified directly, not assumed): on this platform, a delegate-spawned sub-session — even with context_depth="none" — still receives an unconditional hooks-skills-visibility system-reminder listing dozens of installed skill names, regardless of what it was told or asked to do. This was confirmed by direct test: a cold, context-free sub-agent reported seeing the full skill list before any instruction reached it. True technical isolation from the inventory is not currently achievable via delegate alone on this platform. Treat the "don't consult the inventory" instruction above as a policy constraint you are asking the model to honor, not an architectural guarantee — and say so if you rely on it. If a stronger guarantee is ever needed, that requires a different mechanism than same-platform delegate (e.g., an external process with no skill-visibility hook at all); don't claim isolation you haven't verified holds.

Success criteria: A candidate list where each entry has ONE question grounded in a named archetype, not a vibe — derived from the domain's real needs first.

3. Reconcile against the installed inventory — route every candidate

Only now enumerate the FULL installed inventory: load_skill(list=true) for all lens skills, and identify every existing panel — council (6: intent-keeper, cranky-old-sam, crusty-old-engineer, restless-old-brian, user-advocate, tester-breaker), design-council (7 design lenses), adversarial-review (6: SRE, security, staff engineer, finance, operator, developer advocate — production/operational risk of a system design; note it also ships a recipe-callable systems-design-critic agent form of the same bench, a third composition pattern worth considering in Step 6's optional extension), plus any others surfaced by the inventory scan.

Build a coverage matrix: the Step 2 candidate list × existing lenses. Route each candidate to exactly one of:

• REUSE — an existing lens already owns this exact question → compose by reference; record its home bundle + graceful-degradation note.
• BUILD-skill — a real, distinct review question with no owner → Step 5.
• BUILD-agent — not a review lens at all but an active builder/specialist → Step 4.

Don't let reconciliation silently re-inflate what Step 2 derived as ideal. If an existing lens is a near-but-imperfect match for a Step 2 candidate, check whether it's a genuine REUSE or whether accepting it is convenience posing as fit — a real mismatch is still a BUILD, even if something adjacent already exists.

Then apply the needs-its-own-council test (all three required): distinct target class; ≥4–5 net-new orthogonal lenses; folding them into an existing bench would make it incoherent or oversized (>~8). If it fails, STOP and recommend personafy-ing the 1–2 new lenses into the existing council instead.

Don't fix the headcount before this step produces it. Naming a target number ("we want N lenses") before deriving the roster is the same bias this step exists to prevent, aimed at a different constraint — the count is an output of Steps 2–3, not an input to them. If real evidence (multiple independent derivations, actual usage history, a genuine overlap check) later argues for a different count than what a single pass produced, that's a reason to re-derive, not to trim or pad toward a number decided in advance.

Bench-size guidance (a strong default, not a gate)

Grounded in the real benches confirmed in this ecosystem, not invented round numbers: council runs exactly 6 (intent-keeper, cranky-old-sam, crusty-old-engineer, restless-old-brian, user-advocate, tester-breaker) — confirmed directly from its own SKILL.md. adversarial-review runs exactly 6 (SRE, security, staff engineer, finance, operator, developer advocate) — confirmed via its own declared skill description, surfaced live in-session (its source file was not available to inspect directly, so this is a metadata-level confirmation, not a file-level one — say so if you're ever in the same position). design-council runs exactly 7 — confirmed directly from its own SKILL.md. A product-council instance in this ecosystem grew from 7 to 8 after a genuinely orthogonal 8th lens passed the collapse-test gate against its single closest neighbor — confirmed directly from its own SKILL.md and bundle.md, which both flag 8 explicitly as "the edge, not the comfortable middle" of the range below.

From these four real data points — 6, 6, 7, 8 — treat as a strong default:

• Hard floor ~4. Below four lenses, you don't have enough irreducible perspectives to justify calling the thing a "council" rather than just adding a couple of extra reviewers to whatever bench already exists — the orchestration overhead (roster manifest, cold fan-out, debate-to-consensus machinery) stops paying for itself. No confirmed bench in this ecosystem runs below 6; treat 4 as the line below which you should stop and ask whether this needs the council mechanism at all, not just a smaller one.
• Typical/comfortable range 5–7. Brackets all three of the smaller confirmed working benches (6, 6, 7) — the load a synthesizer can hold in its head, attribute every claim to, and quote verbatim from, per lens, without the Phase-5/Phase-4 synthesis guardrails becoming unwieldy.
• Soft ceiling ~8. design-council's 7 is the largest comfortable confirmed precedent; the one 8-lens bench on record explicitly flags itself as sitting at the edge of the range, not inside it. Above 8, the cost of full cold fan-out (every lens spawned in an isolated sub-session) and the cognitive load on the human reading the synthesis both start to degrade faster than the added orthogonality is worth — that's the signal to fold an overlapping lens into a sibling, or split into two councils with genuinely distinct target classes, rather than keep growing one bench.

This is guidance for your judgment in this step, not a hard-coded gate. Trust the model with the why, not a rigid headcount: if a candidate lens genuinely passes the orthogonality/collapse-test gate — a real, distinct, evidence-grounded load-bearing question with no existing owner — that is stronger evidence than a round number, and the bench should grow to fit the evidence, exactly as product-council did going from 7 to 8. The moment a 9th genuinely-orthogonal candidate shows up for any bench, treat that as the trigger to seriously reconsider whether it's still one council — not a reason to silently wave the 9th one in past the ceiling above.

• Human checkpoint: confirm the roster (reused + new), and the own-council-vs-add-lenses decision, before any building.

Success criteria: Every candidate routed; the own-council decision is explicit and defensible against all existing panels. Rule: ground the decision in the actual inventory, not assumption.

4. Skill-lens vs agent decision (only for BUILD-agent candidates)

Consult the skills-vs-agents framework (load_skill("skills-assist")). Default: a review lens → persona SKILL. Choose an agent only when the member must wield its own tools, produce artifacts, or run isolated multi-turn builds — i.e. it builds, it doesn't judge. If the domain's members are mostly builders, say so plainly: you are producing an agent-specialist panel (fan-out delegate to builder agents, synthesize artifacts), which is a different orchestration than a critique council — do not force it into the council template.

Success criteria: Each new member is typed skill-lens or agent with a one-line justification.

5. Build the missing lenses

For each BUILD-skill lens, run personafy end-to-end (study family → define the load-bearing question + contrast table → mine voice/discipline from real evidence → draft to the council-native lens template → prove it steers → reduce). Write each to <council-bundle>/skills/<lens>/SKILL.md.

• Execution: Delegate one personafy run per lens (parallel where the lenses are independent); model_role="reasoning".

Success criteria: Each new lens has a verbatim-grounded profile, an explicit Verdict Protocol returning {lens,verdict,findings[],evidence[]}, and a Tension-With section naming its seams against the rest of the bench. Rule: if two new lenses' contrast tables don't cleanly separate, one of them isn't a lens — merge or cut. Artifacts: the new SKILL.md paths.

6. Assemble the orchestrator

Instantiate templates/council-orchestrator.SKILL.md.tmpl → <council-bundle>/skills/<domain>-council/SKILL.md, and the inline counterpart → <domain>-council-here/SKILL.md. Fill: the bench (mandatory vs conditional split), where each lens lives (in-bundle vs reused-cross-bundle + its UNAVAILABLE reason string), the target class, and whether a neutral pre-digest phase applies (repo targets → yes, like council; single-artifact targets → no, like design-council — delete the phase and renumber down if not needed). Preserve every trust guardrail verbatim.

Optional extension: if a recipe-driven consumer is identified (per the adversarial-review / systems-design-critic precedent from Step 3), also expose a thin delegate-able agent wrapper over the same bench for recipe-context callers. Only add this if a real recipe consumer exists — do not build it speculatively.

Success criteria: Orchestrator + here-counterpart exist, bench hard-coded, graceful-degradation covers every reused (cross-bundle) lens. Rule: keep <domain>-council/<domain>-council-here in sync — same roster, same guardrails, only the target differs.

7. Scaffold the bundle and choose its home

Instantiate bundle.md.tmpl, behavior.yaml.tmpl, awareness.md.tmpl into a new amplifier-bundle-<domain>-council (thin: includes the skills bundle + its own behavior; behavior points tool-skills.config.skills at @<bundle>:skills and context.includes the thin awareness pointer). Archetype-named council → public; real-person-named lenses → keep those lenses in a private/team bundle and compose by reference.

• Human checkpoint: confirm the bundle name and home (public vs private).

Success criteria: Bundle composes; awareness pointer is a thin "this council exists, invoke /<domain>-council" — NOT the lens content.

8. Prove the council convenes (end-to-end)

In a FRESH session, run /<domain>-council <realistic target>. Confirm: roster manifest prints first, every rostered lens LOADS (reused cross-bundle lenses included, or degrades to UNAVAILABLE with reason), verdicts return, at least one genuine tension is surfaced as dissent rather than averaged away.

Success criteria: A transcript of a real convened run — roster + attributed verdicts + preserved dissent. Rule: proof is a convened run. "The files exist" is NOT proof (the ROB gate).

9. Reduce and publish

Trim any restated procedure; keep guardrails and verbatim lens quotes. Run the git lifecycle.

• Execution: Delegate branch/commit/PR/merge to foundation:git-ops.
• Human checkpoint: confirm before opening/merging the PR.

Success criteria: PR merged; then, in a clean session after amplifier update, /<domain>-council resolves from the bundle cache — "merged" ≠ "loads for a user."