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The Council

Dominic edited this page Jul 10, 2026 · 1 revision

The Council

Three Artemis instances deliberate in parallel on the same question from three different angles. They share answers between rounds and argue until they agree — or until max rounds is hit. Reserve for high-stakes questions where being wrong is costly.

The three seats

Seat Role
Skeptic Attacks the answer. Probes claims, framings, and assumptions. Holds ground when the others are wrong; concedes with reason when they're right.
Pragmatist Asks what actually works. Stress-tests the answer against reality — what ships, what runs, what survives contact with users and constraints.
Synthesist Asks what the question really is. Steps back, questions the framing itself. Often surfaces a third path that dissolves the disagreement between the other two.

How the rounds work

  1. Round 1 — all three seats answer in parallel; answers are shared between seats.
  2. Round 2+ — ARGUE: concede or hold with reason; refine based on disagreements. A consensus check runs after each round.
  3. Consensus reached, or max rounds hit → verdict pushed to you.

It runs in the background

When the orchestrator calls the council tool, it immediately tells you "The Council is deliberating — I'll respond with the verdict when they reach one" and ends its turn. The Council keeps running in the background (1–3 minutes).

When the seats converge (or hit max rounds), the verdict is pushed to you as a new follow-up message — including the full round-by-round deliberation trace, so you can see how they argued it out. The full verdict is also saved to a markdown file under council-verdicts/ for later reference.

How to call it

Use Convene The Council on this: followed by a self-contained question. The seats can't see chat history, so include everything they need.

Convene The Council on this: should I learn Rust or Go first given
I already know Python and want to build backend services?

Per-seat model overrides

In Settings → Council Seats, you can pick a different model for each seat. Different models = genuinely different perspectives. Leave a seat blank to inherit Atlas's model.

Example: Skeptic = a reasoning-strong cloud model, Pragmatist = a fast local model, Synthesist = a different cloud model with a different lens.

When NOT to use it

The Council is 3–10× slower and 3–10× more tokens than a single delegate call. Don't convene it for:

  • Routine questions or lookups — answer directly.
  • Anything you can verify with Bash/Read.
  • Low-stakes advice where "good enough" is fine.

Reserve it for consequential advice, non-obvious debugging conclusions, or decisions with irreversible consequences.

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