Five Advisors, One Skill

Making decisions with LLM Council

Ask Claude a challenging question, and you get one confident answer. You have no way to tell if it is any good, because you only ever saw one perspective.

So now I run my real decisions through a council of five, based on Karpathy’s LLM Council:

🔍 The Contrarian: assumes there is a fatal flaw and goes hunting for it.

🧱 The First Principles Thinker: asks what you are actually trying to solve.

🚀 The Expansionist: names the upside everyone is too cautious to say out loud.

👀 The Outsider: knows nothing about your field, so it catches what only makes sense inside your own head.

⚙️ The Executor: asks what happens Monday morning.

They answer independently and review each other anonymously, then the chairman writes one verdict and one next step.

The surprise: the value is not in getting five answers. It is in seeing exactly where they disagree. That is where your real decision has been hiding.

🗣️ What decision have you only ever considered from one perspective?

Originally published on Substack.