Six product-delivery review lenses that write their verdicts before seeing each other's, argue to a synthesis, and hand it back with the dissent still in it.
A single assistant reading your plan has no structural reason to object. It reads what you wrote, in the frame you wrote it in, and helps. Agreement is the default failure mode.
Just later. The unvalidated problem, the missing metric, the alternative the customer will actually pick — those show up three weeks in, when reversing costs a sprint.
Someone who only cares whether the problem is real. Someone who only cares whether anyone wants it. Someone who only cares what it costs to land. In one room, on demand.
Runs in its own session. It cannot see your chat — so you hand it something concrete: a file, a design doc, a repo path.
Clean-room review. Nothing from the conversation leaks in to soften it. It reviews a snapshot — see Limits.
Runs inside the session you're already in and reviews the work in front of you — the plan, roadmap or scope decision you've been building this whole time.
Use this when the thing being reviewed is the conversation itself, or when the work moved in the last hour.
/council reviews code and systems. /design-council reviews visual and UX work. /product-council reviews product plans, roadmaps and scope decisions.
“Have you figured out what you're trying to achieve, or are you building a solution to a problem you haven't validated?”
Goal drift: has the build wandered from the brief?
Desirability: does the person who has to live with this actually want it?
“What measurable outcome defines success, and how will we know we moved it?”
“Why would the customer choose this over the alternative, including doing nothing?”
“What's most likely to make this slip or fail to land, and is the investment sized to our confidence?”
intent-keeper and user-advocate are reused by reference from the existing engineering /council — not duplicated. One definition, two benches.
Each lens writes its verdict before seeing any of the others'. No anchoring, no first-mover framing.
The lenses see each other and argue. Positions move only when a lens's own test is met.
Every claim is traced to a named lens with a verbatim quote. You can audit who said what.
Unresolved disagreement is written down as a finding. The manifest says exactly who sat on the panel.
It cannot be dropped, softened in passing, or averaged into a milder aggregate. If it moves, the movement is on the record.
Never silently replaced with a substitute. A five-lens run tells you it was a five-lens run.
Verbatim quote, named lens. No anonymous “the review found” smoothing over which lens actually held the position.
Most review tools optimize toward a single confident answer. This one treats leftover disagreement as the product. When six lenses still disagree at the end, that tension is the finding — and it is written into the verdict rather than smoothed out of it.
The roster was derived by councilify — a meta-skill for building councils, already public in the same bundle. It derived the axes blind, shipped a subset, and documented the reasoning for everything it left out.
Three of the four excluded lenses were known “always-find-a-gap” reviewers. Adding them would have compounded over-criticism until every verdict read the same. Excluding them was calibration-positive — a bench that always fails everything carries no information.
The author rejected an initial eight-lens version and demanded data. Ten variants — five sizes × two derivation flavors — were run against three scenarios in isolated Digital Twin Universe containers, and scored across five dimensions. Six won.
On 23 July 2026 the council reviewed our own simulated-user-research tool. positioning-critic found the product fighting an unwinnable fight: the winnable category was “automated pre-flight product audit,” not “user research” — and it noted that the genuine moat “appears in zero sentences of positioning anywhere in the repo.”
outcome-cartographer“Nowhere does any artifact say what number a successful product would move.”
Closing line: “Name the number first.”
The author instructed a self-hosting architecture. All six lenses came back against it. bet-sizer priced it: roughly 10% confidence a self-host v1 produces a usable signal, versus ~85% team-hosted.
The author accepted. The brief was amended.
A 28-subcommand rewrite killed — and a live config-corruption path exposed on the way.
An expensive bezel-rail design killed after the panel proved both premises it rested on were false. A zero-cost alternative shipped instead.
In another project, all seven ranked fixes were built and committed in one session — including a metric-integrity fix from outcome-cartographer: “A metric that improves when the system breaks is worse than no metric.”
f5ea2a0| The honest ledger — 27 invocations | Count | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Substantive | ~20 | produced a substantive finding |
| Partial or ignored | 5 | verdict produced, action incomplete or absent |
| No verdict at all | 2 | provider overload / interrupt |
One verdict was produced and flatly dropped — no action, no human response. There is no clean hit rate here and we are not claiming one.
One recommendation — “get one real second human” — was raised four separate times and remains unactioned. The assistant itself logged “Third council ask, still unactioned.” A council whose advice is sometimes ignored is the true story.
Because /product-council forks, it can miss work shipped minutes earlier. In one real run it flagged something already shipped 40 minutes prior. That limitation is exactly why /product-council-here exists.
The bench is deliberately caution-skewed and documents this in its own derivation notes. It will help you not overbuild. It will not push you to be bolder.
All 27 invocations are one person, across ten projects. One outcome is traced end-to-end to a shipped artifact; the others rest on the assistant's report of a commit. Read this as an early internal signal, not independent validation.
Review something concrete — forks, runs isolated, cannot see your chat:
Review what's in front of you — runs inline, in this session:
When the cost of reversing is a conversation, not a sprint. This is the moment the bench is calibrated for.
intent-keeper exists for exactly the build that has quietly wandered from its brief.
Six named objections, on the record, are a defensible input to the prioritization conversation.
f5ea2a0, to microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills