consilium

Multi-model deliberation CLI. 5 frontier LLMs debate your question, then Claude Opus 4.6 judges and synthesizes a recommendation.

How it works

1. Blind phase — Each model answers independently (no herding)
2. Cross-pollination — Models read all blind claims and investigate gaps
3. Debate — Structured rounds with a rotating challenger ensuring sustained disagreement
4. Judge — Claude Opus synthesizes using Analysis of Competing Hypotheses
5. CollabEval — Gemini critiques the judge's synthesis; judge revises
6. Extraction — Structured Do Now / Consider Later / Skip recommendations

Auto-routes by difficulty: simple questions get quick parallel queries ($0.10), complex ones get full council deliberation ($0.50).

Why multi-model?

Multi-model collaboration produces better outcomes than any single model — but naive "ask multiple models and vote" fails. Most of the benefit from debate comes from majority voting alone; the iterative discussion is a martingale that doesn't improve expected correctness without targeted interventions. consilium implements those interventions:

Models

5 distinct labs on the panel. The judge (Google) is not in the panelist pool.

Install

# Build from source
cargo build --release

# Binary at target/release/consilium
# Optionally symlink:
ln -s $(pwd)/target/release/consilium ~/.local/bin/consilium

Requires OpenRouter API key:

export OPENROUTER_API_KEY=sk-or-v1-...
export GOOGLE_API_KEY=AIza...  # optional, Gemini fallback

Usage

# Auto-route (Opus picks the best mode)
consilium "Should I take this job offer?"

# Quick parallel — independent opinions, no debate (~$0.10)
consilium "Best practices for error handling in Rust?" --quick

# Full council with JSON output (~$0.50)
consilium "Microservices vs monolith for a 5-person startup?" --council --format json

# Deep — auto-decompose + 2 debate rounds (~$0.90)
consilium "How should banks govern AI agents?" --deep

# Oxford debate — binary for/against + verdict (~$0.40)
consilium "Should we adopt Kubernetes?" --oxford

# Red team — adversarial stress-test (~$0.20)
consilium "My plan: rewrite the backend in Rust over 6 months" --redteam

# Roundtable discussion (~$0.30)
consilium "Future of open-source AI models?" --discuss --rounds 2

# Socratic examination (~$0.30)
consilium "Is consciousness computable?" --socratic

Modes

Key flags

--persona "context"         Personal context injected into prompts
--domain banking|healthcare Domain-specific regulatory context
--challenger gemini         Assign contrarian role (council mode)
--decompose                 Break question into sub-questions first
--xpol                      Cross-pollination phase (council mode)
--followup                  Interactive drill-down after synthesis (council mode)
--rounds N                  Rounds for discuss/socratic (0 = unlimited)
--effort low|medium|high    Per-phase reasoning effort for thinking models
--thorough                  Disable early consensus exit
--output file.md            Save transcript to file
--format json|yaml|prose    Output format
--share                     Upload to secret GitHub gist
--quiet                     Suppress live output (auto-enabled when not a TTY)
--no-save                   Don't auto-save session

Session management

consilium --stats           # Cost breakdown by mode
consilium --sessions        # List recent sessions
consilium --view            # View latest in pager
consilium --view "career"   # View session matching term
consilium --search "AI"     # Search session content
consilium --watch           # Live tail (styled terminal)
consilium --tui             # Full TUI viewer
consilium --doctor          # Check API keys and connectivity

Architecture

~6,100 lines of Rust. Single 4.7MB binary, ~50ms cold start.

• Single tokio runtime, async throughout
• SSE streaming with <think> block filtering (DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI reasoning)
• CostTracker via AtomicU64 (micro-dollars, lock-free across tasks)
• Output trait enables TeeOutput (stdout + live file) for watch/TUI
• LiveWriter with PID-based file management and stale cleanup

Prior art

Rewritten from consilium-py (Python, 5,091 lines). Same CLI interface, same modes, same output format, same ~/.consilium/ session directory. Both versions can coexist and read each other's sessions.

License

MIT