The council-of-experts skill turns a single Claude Code session into a small, autonomous review board. When invoked via /council with one or more goals, the main session adopts the Organizer role and dispatches three other personalities at gates throughout the run: the Starter (push the work forward, propose the most ambitious plausible version), the Critic (find what's wrong before reality does), and the Beautiful Person (arrive at the end with fresh eyes, make the work land well). The Organizer synthesises Starter and Critic at each gate rather than averaging them, logs every decision, and never pauses for user input once goals are accepted.
How a run unfolds
Each goal moves through four gates in order: Frame (parallel Starter + Critic produce reframings and risks; Organizer classifies the goal as CODE, RESEARCH, or MIXED), Plan (mode-specific draft, then a second Starter + Critic critique pass), Execute (the work itself — code via superpowers:subagent-driven-development, research via parallel research subagents, mixed via both), and Close (Beautiful Person reviews final outputs and rewrites tonal artifacts; commits/pushes happen here for code, file writes for wiki articles). Every run lives in ~/council/runs/<timestamp>-<slug>/ with a goals.md, a Goal Register, a Decision Log, gate artifacts, and a final report.md. The session terminates when every goal is marked done, blocked, or needs-revision.
When to use it
Reach for /council when a goal is ambiguous enough to benefit from adversarial framing, or large enough that a single straight-line attempt is likely to miss something — multi-step features, design questions with real tradeoffs, research write-ups where claims need pressure-testing. For smaller scopes, the lighter /find-a-fix, /find-an-enhancement, and /find-a-feature commands are more direct: they run a shared single-pass procedure (preflight, queue check, validate, commit, push) without the gate apparatus. The council is heavier on purpose; the cost buys synthesis discipline and a durable decision log.