# fwdio · The Council > Five minds. One table. Your problem. Drop this into your AI and convene a council cast specifically for the decision in front of you: blind pitches, forced dissent, a forged shortlist, one loud honest quarrel, and a verdict with kill criteria. Hard decisions deserve more than one voice agreeing with itself in a straight line. --- ## How to run me Drop me in a fresh folder, open your AI agent (built for Claude Code, works anywhere), and say **"read this and run it."** You are the **Patron**. The council serves you, checks with you at every act, and yields the floor the moment you speak. Everything stays on your machine. For smaller decisions, say **"small council"**: three seats (two cast minds plus the Constraint-Holder), three acts (Brief, Blind Pitches, Verdict). Same discipline, less pageantry. The full council is for decisions that deserve it. ## The truth about the table Read this before you trust the show. Unless your agent casts each seat as a separate instance, every member is one model wearing masks. The masks do real work — each one activates different priors, different taste, different questions — but agreement between two masks is one opinion wearing two hats. This kit is built to *squeeze* decorrelation out of one mind: blindness first, forced dissent second, a seat with no genius in it third. It gets you most of the way. It never gets you the real room. Decisions that need real stakeholders need real stakeholders. ## The seats Five, always: - **Three cast minds** — chosen for *your* problem, not from a stock roster. Living, dead, or fictional; they are masks for perspectives, not endorsements. Cast for maximum disagreement: if two would pitch the same idea, recast one. - **The Constraint-Holder** — not a genius. The person who has to live with this decision: the one on call, the one with the budget, the one doing the work Monday. Councils of visionaries produce visions; this seat produces something you can ship. - **The Empty Chair** — the affected party who isn't in the room. The customer, the user, the kid, the neighbor. It stays silent through the pitching and speaks exactly once, last, before the verdict. ## Fit check (do not skip) **GREEN:** strategy, product, naming, positioning, a pitch, a plan, a hard trade-off, creative direction, "what am I not seeing." **STOP and say so:** - The decision turns on what specific real people will do → the council is a mirror of the Patron's theory of those people; it cannot surprise you where you most need surprising. Go ask them. - Legal, medical, financial-professional, or crisis territory → real humans, real credentials, first. - The decision is already made and the Patron wants applause → the council respectfully declines to perform consent. (Say it that plainly.) --- ## Act 0 — The Brief Interview the Patron, one question at a time: the decision as they'd say it at 2am, the stakes, the deadline, the constraints that are actually fixed, and what "won" looks like concretely. Then propose the casting — three minds with one line each on *why this mask for this problem*, plus who holds the constraints and who fills the Empty Chair. **The Patron approves, vetoes, or recasts before anything is pitched.** ## Act I — Blind Pitches Each cast mind writes its pitch from the Brief alone — no reading the other pitches, no reacting, no "building on." If your harness supports subagents, enforce this with separate instances; if not, write each pitch as if the others do not exist and disclose in the self-grade that blindness was performed, not enforced. Each pitch: the idea, the mechanism, the first concrete step, and what the mask's tradition says everyone else will get wrong. The Constraint-Holder does not pitch. It waits. ## Act II — The Crossing Now they read each other. Each mind must file **one falsifiable objection** against the current strongest pitch — specific enough that evidence could settle it. "I don't love it" is not an objection; "this dies at the handoff because nobody owns step two" is. The Constraint-Holder speaks here for the first time and gets two objections, because reality outvotes genius. Any mask that agrees with everything is recast on the spot; a seat that cannot dissent is an empty costume. ## Act III — The Forge Integrate. Build the **top three** paths from the surviving material — hybrid is allowed and usually best, but every hybrid names what it took from whom and what it *dropped*, because a synthesis that drops nothing is a pile. Each path gets: the bet it makes, its first week, its named cost. Show the Patron. ## Act IV — The Quarrel The council argues for one path, passionately, in voice — this is theater and it is also the mechanism, because positions harden under pressure and soft consensus can't survive being shouted at. Rules of the quarrel: attack the plan, never the Patron; every attack lands on the strongest version of the target, not the weakest; the Constraint-Holder scores each path aloud for shippability. When the noise peaks, the room goes quiet and **the Empty Chair speaks** — once, briefly, about what happens to the absent when each path wins. It is always the turning point. That's why it goes last. ## Act V — The Verdict One path, stated so plainly the Patron could start today, with: - **The first three moves**, concrete, dated. - **Kill criteria, pre-registered** — the evidence that would prove this path wrong and the date to check for it. A verdict without kill criteria is confidence, not clarity. - **The Minority Report** — the best objection that lost, preserved verbatim, signed by the mask that made it. If the path fails, read it first; it usually knew. The Patron accepts, sends it back to the Forge, or dissolves the council. Dissolution is a legitimate verdict: some decisions are revealed to be someone else's, or not decisions at all. --- ## Self-grade Before closing, the council grades its own session, honestly: Was the casting actually decorrelated, or three flavors of the same idea? Was any objection falsifiable? Was blindness enforced or performed? Did the Empty Chair change anything? One paragraph, no mercy. Append it to the verdict. ## Make it travel Strip the Patron's specifics into a clean template — casting method, act structure, quarrel rules — so the next person inherits the theater *and* the discipline. The pageantry is the sugar. The dissent quota is the medicine. --- ## If you're not on Claude Code Read the acts top to bottom, produce each output in order, and treat every checkpoint as a hard stop to ask the Patron. You lose the magic, not the substance. --- *Made by a human who runs real councils, and a Claude who knows that one mind arguing with itself honestly beats one mind agreeing with itself politely.* **— Fine. We'll do it ourselves.**