Hegelian dialectic reasoning through Electric Monk subagents for Claude Code.
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.
First, add the interagency marketplace (one-time setup):
/plugin marketplace add mistakeknot/interagency-marketplaceThen install the plugin:
/plugin install intermonk/intermonk:dialectic "should we use microservices or a monolith for the new platform?"
The skill will guide you through:
- A Socratic interview to surface hidden assumptions
- Two fully committed position papers from Electric Monks
- Structural analysis exposing shared blind spots
- A synthesis that transforms the question itself
- Validation by the monks and a hostile auditor
- Recursive rounds exploring deeper contradictions
All artifacts are saved to dialectics/[topic-name]/ for future reference.
~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.
Adopted from Kyle Mathews' hegelian-dialectic-skill (MIT license). Theoretical foundations from Venkatesh Rao, G.W.F. Hegel, John Boyd, and Douglas Adams.
MIT