Councils

A council is a saved group of advisors you ask together. Each advisor answers separately, without seeing the others, then you get one recommendation with the disagreement kept in. (In the files and commands, a saved council is called a bench.)

Ready-made councils

Six work as soon as you install:

Name	Who sits on it	Use it for
money	Munger, Naval, Hormozi	Pricing, savings, bets with real money
deals	Voss, Munger, Cialdini	Negotiations, counteroffers, contracts
strategy	Rumelt, Munger, Naval	Where to focus, what to stop, big plans
relationship	Deida, Terry Real	Recurring fights, hard conversations
work-design	Ferriss, Hormozi, Naval	How you spend your time and build your week
shipping	Rayo OS, Naval, Rumelt	Should you build this, and will you finish it

Call one:

/chiron:council money "should I move my emergency fund into index funds?"

In Codex and ChatGPT: Convene the money council: should I move my emergency fund into index funds?

Some of these pairs disagree on record (Voss and Munger on how a stuck deal moves, Ferriss and Hormozi on how hard to work, Deida and Terry Real on repair). That’s where a council is most useful.

Make your own

The easy way is to ask:

Make me a council called hiring with Munger, Voss and Kahneman.

Or use the command:

/chiron:bench create hiring munger voss kahneman
/chiron:bench list
/chiron:bench remove hiring

Add --global to make it available in every project. Add --depth full for a longer answer by default.

Your first saved council replaces the ready-made six. Chiron offers to copy them into your file first, so you keep them. To get the originals back later, delete your file.

A good size is 2 to 5 advisors. One advisor isn’t a council (use /chiron:ask). Six to eight works but gets noisy. More than eight is refused.

Pick advisors who see the problem differently. Two advisors from the same area mostly repeat each other.

A few worth trying

/chiron:bench create detectives house sherlock columbo --depth full
/chiron:bench create risk taleb kahneman munger
/chiron:bench create launch paul-graham hormozi thiel

• detectives for a bug, a broken number, or a story that doesn’t add up. Three different ways to find what’s wrong.
• risk before a bet that’s hard to undo.
• launch for what to build and how to sell it.

When to use a council, and when not to

Use a council when the decision is expensive or hard to undo, touches several areas at once (part money, part people), or sits on a known disagreement between advisors.

For anything smaller, one advisor is faster and usually just as good. If you’re not sure, ask without naming anyone and Chiron decides. It often says a council isn’t needed, which saves you a couple of minutes.

The file

Councils are plain YAML. You can edit the file directly; Chiron reads the same file.

benches:
  hiring:
    seats: [munger, voss, kahneman]   # advisor ids, 2 to 8
    chairman: neutral                 # who writes the recommendation: "neutral" or an advisor id
    default_depth: quick              # quick (short answer) or full

Where	Scope
~/.chiron/benches.yaml	Every project
.chiron/benches.yaml in a project	Just that project. Wins if the same name exists in both
~/.chiron/benches.yaml doesn’t exist yet	The ready-made six from the plugin are used

An older file at ~/.claude/chiron/benches.yaml is still read, and the next save copies it into ~/.chiron/. In Cowork the file lives in the workspace’s .chiron/ folder; see Cowork.

Advisor ids are listed on the advisors page.

Chair it yourself

If you’ve built your own me advisor with /chiron:distill-me, you can put it on a council and let it write the final recommendation, weighing the others against your own priorities:

benches:
  founder-calls:
    seats: [me, munger, naval, rumelt]
    chairman: me
    default_depth: full

The other advisors still answer separately, and their disagreement stays visible, so you see exactly what you’re overruling. See Build an advisor.