intermonk

intermonk

Hegelian dialectic reasoning through Electric Monk subagents for Claude Code.

What this does

Hard problems have genuine contradictions that can't be resolved by "looking at both sides." The bottleneck isn't intelligence — it's belief. Once you commit to a position, you can't simultaneously hold its negation at full strength. You hedge, steelman weakly, and unconsciously bias comparisons.

intermonk deploys two AI subagents — Electric Monks — that fully believe opposing positions on your behalf. A third agent (the orchestrator) performs structural contradiction analysis and produces a synthesis that transforms the question itself. You operate from a belief-free position: freed from the cognitive load of holding either position, you can analyze the structure of the disagreement.

The process runs seven phases: Socratic interview, prompt calibration, monk spawning, determinate negation, sublation (Aufhebung), validation, and recursion. Each cycle compresses understanding upward. The first round is calibration; real insights emerge in rounds 2-3.

Installation

First, add the interagency marketplace (one-time setup):

/plugin marketplace add mistakeknot/interagency-marketplace

Then install the plugin:

/plugin install intermonk

Usage

/intermonk:dialectic "should we use microservices or a monolith for the new platform?"

The skill will guide you through:

1. A Socratic interview to surface hidden assumptions
2. Two fully committed position papers from Electric Monks
3. Structural analysis exposing shared blind spots
4. A synthesis that transforms the question itself
5. Validation by the monks and a hostile auditor
6. Recursive rounds exploring deeper contradictions

All artifacts are saved to dialectics/[topic-name]/ for future reference.

Cost

~300-400K tokens per round for external-research domains (engineering, strategy, policy). ~100-200K for personal/values domains. Recursive rounds add ~25-50K each. Use the strongest available model for best results.

Attribution

Adopted from Kyle Mathews' hegelian-dialectic-skill (MIT license). Theoretical foundations from Venkatesh Rao, G.W.F. Hegel, John Boyd, and Douglas Adams.

License

MIT