Amicus

Amicus

A multi-model LLM Council for Claude — with a parallel AI window underneath.

Hand Claude a plan, a design, a diff, an architecture decision, a manuscript — anything — and say *council review this*: Amicus routes it through several models from different families, has them anonymously cross-review each other, and a non-Claude chair synthesizes a verdict you turn into accept/deny edits. Or skip the ceremony and fork a single conversation to Gemini, GPT, DeepSeek, or any other model — it works in parallel with full context, and you fold the result back when you're ready. Claude orchestrates throughout; you stay in your editor.

The same council — more ways to run it: take it headless in CI with no Claude runtime, sharpen it with a debate round, or run it on free local models (Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM) at $0 — private and offline.

[Quick start ↓](#quick-start) · Commands · Documentation · Troubleshooting

Supported clients: Claude Code CLI, Claude Desktop, and Claude Cowork are fully tested and supported. Claude Code web is experimental.

Table of Contents

• What is Amicus
• The Council
• Ways to run the council
• Quick start
• 1. Install
• 2. Configure — don't skip this
• 3. Your first council
• 4. Your first sidecar
• Requirements & Dependencies
• The parallel window
• Commands
• Models
• MCP integration
• Configuration
• JSON output
• Windows
• Troubleshooting
• Documentation
• Contributing
• Built on OpenCode
• Attribution & License

What is Amicus

One install delivers six things that work together:

• The `second-opinion` LLM Council skill. Structured multi-model review: independent reviews → anonymized peer cross-review → a non-Claude chair verdict → tiered accept/deny decisions. This is the hero.
• The `sidecar` chat skill. Ad-hoc fork/work/fold — spin up one other model in a real window (or headless), work alongside it, fold the summary back.
• The `amicus` CLI (with an `am` alias) and an MCP server. The engine underneath both skills: launches sessions, shares context, runs parallel waves, and exposes the same surface to Claude as MCP tools.
• A self-updating model catalog. Aliases and validation resolve against a live catalog fetched from provider APIs (cached locally), so model names stay current without a hard-coded table.
• Observability. amicus watch renders any live or finished run (fan-out or council) from any terminal; --follow streams milestones as they happen; --on-complete fires a hook when a run lands; --retry-failed plus opt-in cheaper-model fallbacks recover dead legs without relaunching the whole wave; amicus spend answers "what did this cost, and where" with per-run attribution.
• Council Workspace. amicus watch --ui: a window that shows a council *thinking* — live seats, the anonymized judge packet, the adjudication matrix, dissent drill-in, chair verdict, and cost-by-seat — for both live and historical runs. It also auto-opens on an MCP-invoked council run from Claude Code (local), so you no longer have to remember the flag (see docs/council.md).

Claude is the orchestrator. The council and chat skills run *on top of* the engine; you talk to Claude, and Claude drives Amicus.

The Council

Trigger it by saying *"council review this"* to Claude, or, on the plugin channel, run `/amicus:council` directly.

Why multi-model. Any single model — including the one running your session — has consistent blind spots. Route the *same* material through models from *different* families and the disagreements surface: missed issues, overstated confidence, claims one model alone would have waved through. The council is the structured version of that idea.

The flow, in five beats:

1. Independent reviews. Each council model reviews the artifact on its own (one parallel wave), producing a structured findings list — claim, severity (blocker | major | minor | nit), location, rationale.
2. Anonymized cross-review. Claude relabels every review (Review A, B, C…) and sends the identical bundle to every model. Each model ranks the reviews and adjudicates every finding (agree | dispute | neutral) — *unknowingly judging its own*, so self-bias washes out. This yields a street-cred ranking and sorts findings into Disputed / Confirmed / Contested / Singleton tiers. Self-bias is washed out per seat: if you deliberately seat one model twice, each seat's vote on the *other* seat's finding is counted as the real peer vote it is, and the finding is flagged when its only corroboration came from its own twin.
3. Chair verdict. A designated non-Claude chair receives the de-anonymized picture — all reviews, rankings, and adjudications — and synthesizes an independent verdict. Claude presents it verbatim; Claude does not synthesize.
4. Tiered decisions. Confirmed findings get one bulk accept/deny; Contested and Singleton findings are decided one at a time (accept / deny / modify).
5. Outputs applied. Accepted findings are written into a reviewed copy of the source; the full run is captured in the run folder.

flowchart LR

A["Artifact"] --> B["Independent reviews"] B --> C["Anonymized cross-review"] C --> D["Chair verdict (non-Claude)"] D --> E["Tiered accept / deny"] E --> F["Reviewed copy

• run folder"]

What a run produces (in output/ -council/):

• review- .md × N — each model's independent review.
• crossreview-matrix.md — the adjudication grid plus the de-anonymized street-cred table.
• verdict.md — the chair's synthesis.
• report.md — synthesis + the full decision log + a per-call run-stats table.
• report.html — the deterministic renderer output (adjudication matrix, street-cred table, findings-by-tier, cost — no chair prose). This is the default artifact handed to the user.
• For an editable source, the accepted edits land in -reviewed. next to the original.

Optional council elements (v2.2.0, all default off): four opt-in behaviors, offered once as a menu at launch — nothing turns on unless you name it, and the confirmation lists exactly what's on. Chair verdict scale *(standard since v2.2.0's follow-ups — no longer opt-in)*: the chair always closes with 3–5 hard questions and one parseable VERDICT: Ship it | Fix these first | Fundamental rethink line.

• Critic seat — one reviewer swaps to a four-pass adversarial brief (adversarial pass, edge-case hunt, consistency check, executability test). Its findings enter the same anonymized bundle as everyone else's, so the bench disciplines the critic: manufactured negativity lands Disputed and dies in the tally.
• Expert lenses — each reviewer takes a distinct expert perspective; you pick the panel domain (business, technical, customer, financial, or custom). Lens runs never feed the reliability ledger, and the report discloses the weakened cross-review anonymity.
• Debate mode — after cross-review, every Contested or Disputed finding goes back to its raiser to defend, amend, or withdraw, and the disputing judges re-vote. Exactly one rebuttal round, then the final tally.
• Claude in the council — Claude adds its own fresh review to the bundle so the bench ranks and adjudicates it. Claude is *judged* but never votes or chairs, so the verdict stays independent.

The critic and lens methodologies are adapted from the /critic and /debate agents in John Renaldi's product-kit (MIT); the briefing boilerplate lives in skills/second-opinion/SEAT-BRIEFS.md.

Cost is disclosed up front. Before any model launches, you see the run shape — including any enabled optional elements — for example:

This run uses 3 council models across 2 fanout waves + 1 chair call, with critic seat + debate mode ON (~7 base runs + up to 6 rebuttal calls).

Then the council waits for your confirmation.

The skill lives at [`skills/second-opinion/SKILL.md`](./skills/second-opinion/SKILL.md); the design spec behind it is [`skills/second-opinion/COUNCIL-DESIGN.md`](./skills/second-opinion/COUNCIL-DESIGN.md). For what amicus council tally|verdict|report|stats actually take as input and produce — field-by-field schemas, verdict.json's provenance, and a full worked example run against the real CLI — see [docs/council.md](./docs/council.md).

Ways to run the council

The council is the hero — start with the everyday way, and reach for the more powerful ways when you need them:

• Just ask, in Claude Code. Hand Claude a plan, diff, design, or manuscript and say *"council review this."* The second-opinion skill runs the whole ritual above in your session, with no setup beyond your API keys. This is how most people use it. → Quick start
• Headless, in CI, with no Claude runtime. amicus council run --prompt-file plan.md --council free runs that same pipeline in one command — reviews → cross-review → tally → chair verdict — writing verdict.json and report.html. It needs no Claude session, so it drops straight into CI. → Headless council (CI)
• With a debate round. Add --debate and every Contested or Disputed finding goes back to its raiser to defend, amend, or withdraw while the disputing judges re-vote — exactly one rebuttal round, then the final tally. → The Council
• On free, local, private models — at $0. Point the council (and sidecars) at an OpenAI-compatible server already running on your machine — Ollama, LM Studio, or vLLM — with amicus provider add. No API key, no per-token bill, nothing leaves your machine, and it works