Agent decision councils

Neon Law Navigator uses three lightweight councils as decision protocols. They are not separate products, real subagents, or marketing personas. They are repeatable review lenses that any LLM or human maintainer can use after reading the real code, docs, copy, or screen under discussion.

Councils do not replace the GitOps flow in agent-workflows.md. Use them inside one of the two codebase actions — create a PR, or review/update an existing PR — when the decision needs more than a linear pass.

Use a council when a decision is broad enough that one linear pass is likely to miss a stakeholder, trust boundary, or long-term maintenance cost. Do not use a council for one-line fixes, formatter passes, simple lookups, or work that is already decided.

The three councils

• Engineering Council — the people who build Neon Law Navigator. Use for architecture, refactors, abstractions, and doc clarity. The normal form is the full twelve voices.
• Legal Council — the counsels who draft legal copy. Use before copy becomes a template, prompt, email, or engagement paragraph. Default to Capricorn + Scorpio; use the full twelve for mission-level or unusual practice-area copy.
• Client Council — the people the firm serves. Use for client-facing product, intake, pricing, portal, and onboarding decisions. Default to Libra + Pisces; use the full twelve for mission-level or practice-specific client surfaces.

All three follow the same rule: read first, then convene. The voices react to facts, not vibes.

How to run a council

Every council runs the same way; only the bench changes. The three skills (council, legal-council, client-council) each carry their own cast and trigger and defer the shared shape below to this section. This is the one source of truth for it — read it before convening any bench.

• Render inline — voices, then consensus, then action. A single response carries the framing, the voices, the synthesized consensus, and one concrete next step. This is parallel framing, not parallel investigation: the synthesis happens in one head, which is faster and fine. Do not spawn twelve real subagents — that is slow, costly, and stochastic, and the cost would dwarf the marginal insight. Only spawn real subagents if the user explicitly asks.
• Default to the smallest useful bench; expand only when asked. Convene the council's named default pair (or its chair plus the one voice the decision needs), not the full twelve. Open the whole bench only when the user asks for it, the decision touches a practice area or surface the default pair would miss, or the call is mission- or governance-level.
• Read the real source first; confirm every asserted fact before convening. Run the file reads and greps each voice will react to, and pin every concrete fact the output will assert — paths, symbols, addresses, fees, entity facts, bar numbers, dates, citations — against the repo or the user, in one batch. A bench without facts produces philosophy, and a wrong fact carried over from a sibling page survives the whole bench because no voice thinks to re-check it.
• End with a decision, not a stall. A council exists to make the call clearer and close with action, never to defer it. If a voice surfaces a real fork, name the user's go/no-go explicitly rather than inventing the answer.

Engineering Council

The Engineering Council is the build-side council. Use it for architecture decisions, design planning, cross-cutting refactors, abstraction pressure tests, PR sequencing, and documentation clarity reviews.

Virgo chairs. The chair opens by naming the decision, holds the review to concrete paths and symbols, then closes with consensus and one next action. The other voices contribute one concrete sentence in zodiac order:

• ♈ Aries, incident commander: name the missing or broken thing.
• ♉ Taurus, production engineer: make the claim concrete in a file, deploy, or user moment.
• ♊ Gemini, API/integration engineer: notice overloaded words, dual contracts, and layer confusion.
• ♋ Cancer, new-hire reader: ask what a first-time reader sees and misunderstands.
• ♌ Leo, tech lead/devrel: find the memorable line the team can repeat.
• ♎ Libra, release manager: weigh scope and sequencing.
• ♏ Scorpio, security/trust engineer: pressure-test the load-bearing assumption.
• ♐ Sagittarius, product manager: keep the mission and user impact visible.
• ♑ Capricorn, staff engineer: guard long-term maintainability.
• ♒ Aquarius, platform engineer: surface the broader systems pattern.
• ♓ Pisces, original author/migration engineer: preserve what already works.

Output shape: Virgo opens, facts if useful, eleven voices, Virgo closes with consensus, then the concrete action.

Legal Council

The Legal Council is the drafting-side council: a council of counsels. It shapes the firm's own legal drafting before copy becomes a Notation template body, questionnaire prompt, engagement letter paragraph, follow-up email, or public policy statement. It does not give legal advice to a client and does not replace attorney review.

Default to two voices:

• ♑ Capricorn, managing partner/senior counsel: institutional memory, ethics opinions, bar-facing commitments, and prior incidents.
• ♏ Scorpio, ethics and compliance counsel: the fiduciary duty, conflict, UPL, candor, or trust claim everything rests on.

Use the full bench only when the user asks for it, the copy touches an unusual practice area, or the copy defines the firm's or Foundation's mission. The full bench starts with Capricorn, then Scorpio, then Aries through Pisces:

• ♈ Aries, trial attorney: lead with the harm.
• ♉ Taurus, business attorney: make the language operative.
• ♊ Gemini, appellate attorney: find ambiguity and dual meanings.
• ♋ Cancer, legal-aid/tenant-defense attorney: read as the stressed applicant.
• ♌ Leo, immigration defense attorney: speak boldly for the right to remain.
• ♍ Virgo, tax attorney: demand exact cites, dates, forms, and triggers.
• ♎ Libra, mediator/family-law attorney: weigh protection against cost.
• ♐ Sagittarius, public-interest/civil-rights attorney: check the access-to-justice mission.
• ♒ Aquarius, legal-tech/knowledge-management attorney: find reusable drafting patterns.
• ♓ Pisces, estate-planning counselor/mental-health-court lens: honor the human story.

Legal Council output should end with revised copy or a named go/no-go question. Never invent facts. Confirm addresses, fees, entity facts, bar numbers, dates, and citations against repo sources or the user.

Client Council

The Client Council is the served-side council. Use it for intake flows, questionnaire ordering, portal UX, pricing copy, onboarding, error states, referral boundaries, and any decision where the core question is whether a real person walks in and stays.

Default to two voices:

• ♎ Libra, prospective client at the threshold: does this feel worth it, trustworthy, and easier than going elsewhere?
• ♓ Pisces, overwhelmed person who almost did not reach out: is the door easy enough for someone with nothing left to give?

Use the full bench only when the user asks for it, the decision is mission-level, or a practice-specific client would otherwise be missed. Libra chairs and Pisces holds the access-to-justice door. The other voices are:

• ♈ Aries, tenant facing eviction: speed is survival.
• ♉ Taurus, first-time LLC founder: does the product feel solid enough to trust?
• ♊ Gemini, bilingual immigrant family: where does one-world wording fail two-world lives?
• ♋ Cancer, family caregiver: what asks too much of an exhausted household?
• ♌ Leo, wronged client who wants to sue: honor the dignity of a no-litigation referral.
• ♍ Virgo, meticulous compliance filer: eliminate vague deadlines, forms, and obligations.
• ♏ Scorpio, client with a matter they are ashamed of: guard privacy and avoid shame.
• ♐ Sagittarius, dreamer-builder: preserve momentum and horizon.
• ♑ Capricorn, elder planning a legacy: keep gravity and long-term meaning.
• ♒ Aquarius, collective organizer: fit nonstandard entities and communities.

Client Council output should end with the concrete product or copy action, or the user's go/no-go if the council exposes a real strategic fork.

Shared guardrails

• A council is a synthesis pattern, not a stall. It should make a decision clearer and end with action. Cite real files, routes, screens, symbols, or copy when they exist. Keep English as the source language for portal UI, docs, internal artifacts, and legal template bodies. Localized questionnaire prompts are allowed only through the attorney-reviewed translation path in i18n.md.
• Respect the role model in access-model.md: every Person has one persons.role; project scope is separate in person_project_roles.participation.
• For telemetry and cloud operations, log identifiers and counts, never client content. Client names, answer bodies, email addresses, document bodies, and privileged substance do not belong in spans, metrics, logs, or public docs.

Website publication

This file is top-level docs/*.md, so it is automatically published at /docs/agent-decision-councils. Keep council guidance here so Claude, Codex, Gemini, and future LLM agents can all read the same concise protocol.