Your AI council needs better characters

The LLM Council is fine. But have you tried asking the contestants of Love Island instead?

Jul 21, 2026

AI councils are too respectable.

Boring.

Some combination of:

The Strategic Advisor
The Risk Analyst
The Customer Advocate
The Technical Expert
The Innovation Lead

A sensible group of faceless people who sound like they’re in a windowless office somewhere talking about operational synergy.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

It could be the Council of Elrond.

It could be a pirate crew.

It could be your younger self, your exhausted present self, your hypothetical 70-year-old self, and someone who thinks your entire definition of success is bonkers.

It could be the contestants of Love Island.

That’s the idea behind my Configurable Council, a Claude Code plugin that lets you run a question through a council of AI perspectives you define yourself.

The process might be serious.

The people don’t have to be.

The council is a mechanism

The original LLM Council, by Andrej Karpathy, asks different language models the same question. They answer, review each other’s answers, and pass everything to a final model for a synthesized verdict.

The diversity comes from the models. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI can all make their individual points.

“LLM council” has become a bit of a broader pattern now. Run one model several times, give each instance a different role or perspective. Ask them to approach the problem from different angles.

The diversity is from the prompt, not the model.

The Configurable Council uses that second pattern.

Each member of the council answers separately. Then the answers are redistributed and they review them - anonymously. A chairman weighs the arguments and produces a recommendation.

But you can decide who’s on that council. And that changes more than just the report’s title.

Characters are compact thinking models

A default council might be sensible enough.

A Contrarian tries to find the fatal flaw. A First Principles Thinker asks whether you’re solving the right problem. An Expansionist looks for missed upside. An Outsider catches assumptions. An Executor asks what anyone is actually going to do next.

Professional. Entirely defensible.

But it’s not the Council of Elrond.

Gandalf challenges the framing. Aragorn focuses on practical execution. Boromir looks for power and opportunity. Frodo asks who’ll carry the burden. Galdor demands evidence. Elrond makes the final decision.

The process is the same.

The report is much more dramatic.

But the theme isn’t only decoration.

Any good character is a compact thinking model.

We already understand that Boromir will be drawn to power.

We understand why Frodo cares about the cost to the person doing the work.

We expect Gandalf to tell everyone they have misunderstood the problem.

So we already have a sense of their perspectives.

A “Risk and Governance Advisor” sounds important, but I don’t know how it really thinks.

I have a better idea of how Boromir thinks.

It’s not about more responses

Claude can already generate five answers to the same question.

What we’re trying to do with the council model is generate productive disagreement.

If everyone is kind and helpful, and they produce slightly different versions of the same answer, nothing really happens.

A council needs tension.

Someone should be arguing for the high-risk approach.

Another should think that’s irresponsible and dangerous.

Someone cares about speed. Someone else cares about precedent.

If one person wants to know if the plan will work, another might be asking if success creates a result worth having.

The Configurable Council lets you define explicit tensions. And that disagreement is vital.

A Contrarian isn’t there to add balance. They should be actively trying to kill the idea.

The Expansionist isn’t there to be a cheerleader. They should be trying to push you beyond the caution that undermines the idea.

That’s the work we want.

There is no single council

For a technical architecture question, you might create a council made up of a security engineer, an operator, a maintainer, a finance lead, and the person who gets paged at 3 a.m.

A product strategy question might need a customer, a salesperson, a competitor, a skeptical CFO, and a user who has already decided to leave.

When you’re making a career decision, maybe you need your ambitious younger self, your exhausted present self, your partner, your future self, and someone who thinks you are asking the wrong question entirely.

And some decisions might genuinely benefit from the contestants of Love Island.

Probably not because they know more about corporate strategy.

But expertise might not be what the decision is missing.

Maybe two departments keep saying they’re aligned, but they’re behaving like they’re waiting for someone better to walk into the villa.

Or one team thinks their relationship is an exclusive strategic commitment, and the other behaves like they still want to explore.

Different groups will notice different things.

Your organization probably already has the same groups of people coming together in the same rooms. People with similar backgrounds, incentives, and vocabulary.

Creating a bunch of AI personas that imitate those people doesn’t really give you much diversity.

A dwarf, a hobbit, an elf, a wizard, and a ranger might.

It’s still your verdict

A council is there to provide reasoning.

It’s not there to make the decision.

It’s still AI. A polished report, reviewed responses, a confident-sounding chair.

None of them have to live with the consequences.

Your AI council shouldn’t be an authority. It should expose the assumptions, objections, and missing perspectives around a decision.

It might give you a better answer. It might help you understand why you disagree with the answer it gives. Either will be useful.

The default council is fine.

The Council of Elrond might be better.

Sometimes what your product strategy really needs is a fire-pit conversation with eight people in swimwear trying to work out who’s here for the right reasons.

You don’t always need the same people in the room.

You don’t always need more experts in the room.

You might just need different people in the room.

Robin Cannon

Ready for more?