council

council

A Claude Code plugin that convenes a council of named seats, each with a unique personality, and puts them to work in an interactive meeting or an autonomous work session. The chair routes the others and synthesizes a single answer, keeping any dissent on the record.

Getting started

You don't need to be a programmer to run a council — just to paste a few commands into a terminal. Three steps: get Claude Code, get this plugin, convene your first council.

1. Get Claude Code

council runs inside Claude Code, Anthropic's AI assistant that lives in your terminal. You'll need a Claude account (Pro or Max) or an Anthropic API key to sign in.

Open a terminal (macOS: the Terminal app; Windows: PowerShell) and paste the installer line for your system:

macOS / Linux:

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

Then run claude once — the first run walks you through signing in. If anything snags, the official setup guide has the full instructions.

2. Install the plugin

Start Claude Code anywhere (just run claude in a terminal) and paste these two commands at its prompt:

/plugin marketplace add fingerskier/claude-plugins
/plugin install council@fingerskier-plugins

The first command registers the fingerskier/claude-plugins marketplace as a plugin source; the second installs the council plugin from it. That's the whole install — there is no build step, and /council is now available in every Claude Code session.

Prefer to try it without installing? Clone the repo and load it for a single session instead:

git clone https://github.com/fingerskier/council-claude-plugin
claude --plugin-dir council-claude-plugin

3. Set up your first council

Each council lives in its own folder: its roster, its memory, and its meeting records all stay together there. So make one sub-directory per council — a folder for your product council, another for your writing council, and so on — then start Claude Code inside it:

mkdir product-council
cd product-council
claude

(If you took the try-it-without-installing path in step 2, start Claude Code with claude --plugin-dir ../council-claude-plugin instead, adjusting the path to wherever you cloned it.)

Inside Claude Code, convene the council:

/council convene

It will ask which template to use — software-team is the default; c-suite, product-engineering-team, solo-founder, writing-lab, and hedge-fund-team are also bundled. Convening stamps a .council/ directory into your folder with editable seat files — the council is now yours to tune.

Check the roster and hold your first meeting:

/council info
/council meeting "should we adopt a job queue?"

To run a second council, make another sub-directory and convene there. Each folder keeps its own .council/, so councils never share seats, memory, or records. (You can also convene directly inside an existing project's repo — .council/ is created wherever you run convene.)

Note: the autonomous /council work verb edits files in a git worktree, so its folder must be a git repository (run git init once inside it). convene, info, and meeting work in any folder.

Why a council?

A single agent doesn't disagree with itself. Ask one for a verdict and you get one perspective, confidently — no security engineer poking at the trust boundary, no QA hunting the edge case, no PM asking whether you're solving the right problem. council fixes that: it convenes a roster of opinionated seats, each a distinct persona, has them deliberate, and lets a chair synthesize one answer — while preserving the dissent in an auditable record instead of flattening it into false consensus.

Use it when a decision is worth more than one opinion: a design review, a "should we ship this?" gut-check, an autonomous task you want pressure-tested as it's built.

See PLAN.md for the full design.

Install

This repo is dual-hosted; the host entrypoints are intentionally orthogonal, but both read the same bundled templates/ and personalities/ and create the same project-local .council/. There is no build step.