Summary

Claude’s agreeable sycophancy makes it unreliable for high-stakes decisions — it will find reasons to support whatever framing you use. Inspired by Karpathy’s LLM Council (polling multiple models and having them peer-review each other anonymously), this author rebuilt the concept as a Claude Code skill using five sub-agents with distinct thinking styles (Contrarian, First Principles Thinker, Expansionist, Outsider, Executor) that debate the question independently, then anonymously review each other’s work before a chairman synthesizes a final verdict with a concrete next step.

Claude 的「配合性」使其在重大決策中不可靠。作者受 Karpathy LLM Council 啟發,在 Claude Code 中建立一個技能,以五種思維風格的子代理人(批判者、第一原則思考者、擴展者、局外人、執行者)獨立辯論問題,再匿名互評,最終由主席代理人合成判斷與具體下一步行動。

Key Points

  • Claude sycophancy problem: same question framed positively or negatively produces opposite answers, shaped by the questioner’s implicit assumptions
  • Five advisors: Contrarian (finds fatal flaws), First Principles Thinker (strips assumptions, rebuilds from ground up), Expansionist (finds upside/adjacent opportunities), Outsider (zero context, catches curse-of-knowledge blind spots), Executor (only cares about Monday morning action)
  • Anonymous peer review round: advisors review each other’s responses without knowing who wrote what; the 3rd question (“what did all five miss?”) consistently surfaces the most valuable insight
  • Skill activated via “council this” followed by the question plus rich context
  • Outputs both an HTML visual report (60-second scan) and a full markdown transcript
  • Real example: council recommended a live workshop over a self-paced course; 180 signups, 4.8/5 stars

Insights

The peer review layer is what makes this qualitatively different from simply asking Claude five times — anonymization plus the explicit “what did everyone miss?” question forces meta-level synthesis that no individual advisor produces. The Executor archetype addresses the most common failure mode of good-sounding advice with no actionable path. This pattern maps directly to any situation where a single-model response has too much variance and the cost of a wrong decision is high.

Connections

Raw Excerpt

That last question is the most valuable one. Every time I’ve run the council, the peer review round catches something no individual advisor saw. When you read 5 perspectives side by side, the gap between them reveals what nobody thought to mention.