new-llm-council

Create a new LLM Council project

Scaffold a fresh LLM Council repository tailored to a specific purpose, based on one of three public template repos or built bespoke.

Background

LLM Council is a deliberation pattern (Karpathy — https://github.com/karpathy/llm-council) where multiple perspectives deliberate on a question, then a chairman synthesizes. Three public templates are available:

• LLM-Council-Template (danielrosehill/LLM-Council-Template) — baseline: six personality-based system prompts, single model, three stages (perspectives → peer review → chairman synthesis). Best for: general ideation, brainstorming, multi-angle commentary.
• LLM-Council-Grounded (danielrosehill/LLM-Council-Grounded) — Template + retrieval layer (Pinecone for domain knowledge, Tavily for real-time web). Best for: factual questions, research-backed deliberations.
• LLM-Council-Decide (danielrosehill/LLM-Council-Decide) — swaps personalities for formal decision-making frameworks (Pros/Cons, Weighted Matrix, Pre-Mortem, 10/10/10, Regret Minimization, etc.). Best for: "should I do X?" decisions.
• Bespoke — a clean scaffold following the council pattern but with council members defined from scratch for a specific domain.

See references/templates.md for full comparison and references/frameworks.md for the Decide framework catalogue.

Workflow

Step 1 — Gather requirements

Ask the user (in one consolidated message) for:

1. Purpose — what is this council for? (one sentence; e.g. "evaluate Kubernetes architecture proposals", "help decide between job offers", "triage biomedical research questions")
2. Visibility — public or private GitHub repo?
3. Base — which of the four bases? Recommend based on purpose:
   • Decision-type question → Decide
   • Factual/research-backed → Grounded
   • General ideation → Template
   • None fit cleanly → Bespoke
4. Repo name — suggest a descriptive name (Train-Case recommended, e.g. LLM-Council-Architecture). Confirm or take user override.
5. Target directory — where to create the local working copy. Default to the current working directory; confirm or take override.
6. GitHub account/org — which account or organization to create the repo under (e.g. the user's personal GitHub username, or a workspace org). Required for the push step.
7. Council members — for Bespoke, ask for 4–6 member roles. For Template/Grounded, ask whether to keep the six default personalities or customize. For Decide, ask whether to hand-pick frameworks or leave auto-select (default).

If the user's initial invocation already included some of these, pre-fill and ask only for missing items.

Step 2 — Create repo skeleton

For Template / Grounded / Decide: clone from GitHub as a starting point, then remove its git history:

TEMPLATE_REPO="danielrosehill/LLM-Council-<Base>"   # Template | Grounded | Decide
DEST="<target-dir>/<RepoName>"
git clone --depth 1 "https://github.com/$TEMPLATE_REPO.git" "$DEST"
rm -rf "$DEST/.git"
cd "$DEST" && git init -b main

For Bespoke: scaffold fresh using the structure in references/bespoke-scaffold.md.

Step 3 — Customize for purpose

Edit these files to reflect the council's specific purpose:

• README.md — replace the top-level description, "Why" section, and any example prompts with ones relevant to the stated purpose. Keep the attribution link to karpathy/llm-council.
• CLAUDE.md (if present) — update the project summary so future Claude Code sessions understand the council's specific focus.
• backend/config.py or equivalent — update council member definitions if the user asked for custom personalities/roles/frameworks.
• Typst templates (if present, under templates/ or prompts/) — update the report title and any purpose-specific headings.

For Decide with hand-picked frameworks: edit the default framework list in the config to the user's selection.

For Bespoke: write the council member system prompts based on the roles the user specified. Each member should have a distinct "lens" — avoid two members with overlapping thinking styles.

Step 4 — Grounding sources (Grounded only)

If base is Grounded, ask whether the user wants to:

• Pre-configure a Pinecone index name (edit .env.example and config)
• Restrict Tavily to specific domains (edit the planning agent prompt)
• Skip both and leave defaults

Step 5 — Initial commit and GitHub push

cd "$DEST"
git add -A
git commit -m "Initial scaffold: LLM Council for <purpose>"

Then create the GitHub repo using gh under the account/org the user specified in Step 1:

# public
gh repo create <account>/<RepoName> --public --source=. --push --description "<one-line purpose>"
# private
gh repo create <account>/<RepoName> --private --source=. --push --description "<one-line purpose>"

If the user prefers not to push immediately, skip this step and report the local path only.

Step 6 — Report

Summarize in 3–5 lines:

• Repo path (local + GitHub URL, if pushed)
• Base template used
• What was customized (members/frameworks/grounding)
• What the user should do next (e.g. cd into repo, add OPENROUTER_API_KEY to .env, run ./start.sh)

Guardrails

• Do not reuse an existing repo name. Check ls <target-dir> | grep -i <name> before creating.
• Do not push secrets — copied .env files should be .env.example only; verify .gitignore covers real .env.
• If the user's requested purpose is sensitive (personal finance, health, legal), default to private even if they didn't specify — and confirm before pushing.
• If gh is not authenticated for the target account, stop at Step 5 and tell the user to run gh auth login first.