war-room

Overview

The War Room convenes multiple AI experts to analyze problems from diverse perspectives, challenge assumptions through adversarial review, and synthesize optimal approaches under the guidance of a Supreme Commander.

Philosophy

"The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle." - Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind

Reversibility-Based Routing

Before deliberation, assess the Reversibility Score (RS) to determine appropriate resource allocation:

RS = (Reversal Cost + Time Lock-In + Blast Radius + Information Loss + Reputation Impact) / 25

| RS Range | Type | Mode | Resources | |----------|------|------|-----------| | 0.04 - 0.40 | Type 2 | Express | 1 expert, < 2 min | | 0.41 - 0.60 | Type 1B | Lightweight | 3 experts, 5-10 min | | 0.61 - 0.80 | Type 1A | Full Council | 7 experts, 15-30 min | | 0.81 - 1.00 | Type 1A+ | Delphi | 7 experts, 30-60 min |

Quick Heuristics:

• Can be A/B tested? → Type 2
• Requires data migration? → Type 1
• Public commitment required? → Type 1A+

See modules/reversibility-assessment.md for full scoring guide.

When To Use

• Architectural decisions with major trade-offs
• Multi-stakeholder problems requiring diverse perspectives
• High-stakes choices with significant consequences (RS > 0.60)
• Novel problems without clear precedent
• When brainstorming produces multiple strong competing approaches

When NOT To Use

• Simple questions with obvious answers
• Routine implementation tasks
• Well-documented patterns with clear solutions
• Time-critical decisions requiring immediate action
• Type 2 decisions (RS ≤ 0.40): use Express mode or skip War Room entirely

Expert Panel

Default (Lightweight Mode)

| Role | Model | Purpose | |------|-------|---------| | Supreme Commander | Claude Opus | Final synthesis, escalation decisions | | Chief Strategist | Claude Sonnet | Approach generation, trade-off analysis | | Red Team | Gemini Flash | Adversarial challenge, failure modes |

Full Council (Escalated)

| Role | Model | Purpose | |------|-------|---------| | Supreme Commander | Claude Opus | Final synthesis | | Chief Strategist | Claude Sonnet | Approach generation | | Intelligence Officer | Gemini 2.5 Pro | Large context analysis (1M+) | | Field Tactician | GLM-5.2 | Implementation feasibility | | Scout | Qwen Turbo | Quick data gathering | | Red Team Commander | Gemini Flash | Adversarial challenge | | Logistics Officer | Qwen Max | Resource estimation |

Deliberation Protocol

Two-Round Default

Round 1: Generation
  - Phase 1: Intelligence Gathering (Scout, Intel Officer)
  - Phase 2: Situation Assessment (Chief Strategist)
  - Phase 3: COA Development (Multiple experts, parallel)
  - Commander Escalation Check

Round 2: Pressure Testing
  - Phase 4: Red Team Review (all COAs)
  - Phase 5: Voting + Narrowing (top 2-3)
  - Phase 6: Premortem Analysis (selected COA)
  - Phase 7: Supreme Commander Synthesis
  - Phase 8: Discussion Publishing

Delphi Extension (High-Stakes)

For high-stakes decisions, extend to iterative Delphi convergence:

• Multiple rounds until expert consensus
• Convergence threshold: 0.85

Integration

With Brainstorm

War Room is AUTOMATICALLY INVOKED from Skill(attune:project-brainstorming) after Phase 3 (Approach Generation).

The brainstorm skill passes all context to War Room:

• Problem statement and constraints
• Generated approaches with pros/cons
• Comparison matrix
• Reversibility assessment (automatically calculated)

Bypass conditions (only if ALL true):

• RS ≤ 0.40 (Type 2 decision - clearly reversible)
• Single obvious approach with no meaningful trade-offs
• Low complexity with well-documented pattern
• User explicitly declines after seeing RS assessment

# Automatic invocation from brainstorm (do not skip)
/attune:war-room --from-brainstorm

# Direct invocation (standalone)
/attune:war-room "Should we use microservices or monolith for this system?"

With Memory Palace

Sessions persist to the Strategeion (War Palace):

~/.claude/memory-palace/strategeion/
  - war-table/      # Active sessions
  - campaign-archive/  # Historical decisions
  - doctrine/       # Learned patterns
  - armory/         # Expert configurations

With Conjure

Experts are invoked via conjure delegation:

• conjure:gemini-delegation for Gemini models
• conjure:qwen-delegation for Qwen models
• Direct CLI for GLM-5.2 (ccgd or claude-glm --dangerously-skip-permissions)

Usage

Basic Invocation

/attune:war-room "What architecture should we use for the new payment system?"

With Context

/attune:war-room "Best approach for API versioning" --files src/api/**/*.py

Reversibility Assessment Only

Quick assessment without full deliberation:

/attune:war-room "Database migration to MongoDB" --assess-only

Output:

Reversibility Assessment
========================
Decision: Database migration to MongoDB

Dimensions:
  Reversal Cost:      5/5 (months of rework)
  Time Lock-In:       4/5 (migration path hardens)
  Blast Radius:       5/5 (all services affected)
  Information Loss:   4/5 (query patterns, ACID)
  Reputation Impact:  2/5 (internal unless downtime)

Reversibility Score: 0.80
Decision Type: Type 1A (One-Way Door)
Recommended Mode: Full Council

Proceed with full deliberation? [Y/n]

Force Express Mode (Type 2)

Skip to rapid decision for clearly reversible choices:

/attune:war-room "Which logging library to use" --express

Force Full Council

Override RS assessment for critical decisions:

/attune:war-room "Migration strategy" --full-council

Delphi Mode

For highest-stakes irreversible decisions:

/attune:war-room "Long-term platform decision" --delphi

Resume Session

/attune:war-room --resume war-room-20260120-153022

Output

Decision Document

The War Room produces a Supreme Commander Decision document:

## SUPREME COMMANDER DECISION: {session_id}

### Reversibility Assessment
| Dimension | Score | Rationale |
|-----------|-------|-----------|
| Reversal Cost | X/5 | ... |
| Time Lock-In | X/5 | ... |
| Blast Radius | X/5 | ... |
| Information Loss | X/5 | ... |
| Reputation Impact | X/5 | ... |

**RS: 0.XX | Type: [1A+/1A/1B/2] | Mode: [delphi/full_council/lightweight/express]**

### Decision
**Selected Approach**: [Name]

### Rationale
[Why this approach was selected]

### Implementation Orders
1. [ ] Immediate actions
2. [ ] Short-term actions

### Watch Points
[From Premortem - what to monitor]

### Reversal Plan (for Type 1 decisions)
[If this decision proves wrong, here's the exit strategy]

### Dissenting Views
[For the record]

Session Artifacts

Saved to Strategeion:

• Intelligence reports
• Situation assessment
• All COAs (with full attribution after unsealing)
• Red Team challenges
• Premortem analysis
• Final decision

Record the Tradeoff (decision journal)

The Supreme Commander Decision is a tradeoff record by construction: a selected approach, the COAs weighed against it, and the dissenting views. Mirror it into docs/tradeoffs.md so the reasoning stays with the code, not only in Strategeion (draft and confirm):

• If leyline is installed, invoke Skill(leyline:decision-journal) and append a tradeoff entry. Map directly: Selected Approach to decision, the RS and rationale to a Y-statement, the rejected COAs to options, and Dissenting Views to consequences_negative. Set phase to the originating phase (for example plan). Record the RS in the entry links. Append on confirmation.
• Fallback (leyline absent): append to docs/tradeoffs.md using the in-file ENTRY TEMPLATE; assign the next TR-NNN id.

If the decision is architectural enough to warrant a numbered ADR in docs/adr/, write the ADR and reference its number from the tradeoff entry rather than duplicating it.

Anonymization

Expert contributions are anonymized during deliberation using Merkle-DAG:

• Responses labeled as "Response A, B, C..." during review
• Attribution revealed only after decision is made
• Hash verification ensures integrity

See modules/merkle-dag.md for details.

Escalation

Automatic (Reversibility-Based)

Deliberation mode is automatically selected based on Reversibility Score:

| RS Score | Automatic Mode | |----------|----------------| | ≤ 0.40 | Express (bypass full War Room) | | 0.41 - 0.60 | Lightweight panel | | 0.61 - 0.80 | Full Council | | > 0.80 | Full Council and Delphi |

Manual Override

The Supreme Commander may override automatic classification when:

• High complexity detected (multiple architectural trade-offs)
• Significant disagreement between initial experts
• Novel problem domain requiring specialized analysis
• Precedent-setting decision (future decisions will follow pattern)
• Political/organizational sensitivity beyond technical scope

Escalation requires written justification with RS assessment.

De-escalation

Equally important: identify decisions being over-deliberated:

• If RS ≤ 0.40, recommend Express mode or immediate execution
• Challenge "false irreversibility" ("we can't change this later" without evidence)
• Track de-escalation rate as team health metric

Configuration

User Settings

{
  "war_room": {
    "default_mode": "lightweight",
    "auto_escalate": true,
    "delphi_threshold": 0.85,
    "max_delphi_rounds": 5
  }
}

Hook Auto-Trigger

War Room can be auto-suggested via hook when:

• Keywords detected ("strategic decision", "trade-off", etc.)
• Complexity score exceeds threshold (0.7)
• User has opted in via settings

Agent Teams Execution Mode

Overview

When --agent-teams is specified (or auto-selected for Full Council / Delphi modes), the War Room uses Claude Code Agent Teams instead of sequential conjure delegation. Each expert runs as a persistent teammate with bidirectional messaging, enabling real-time deliberation instead of batch request/response cycles.

Requires: Claude Code 2.1.32+, CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1, tmux installed.

When Agent Teams Helps

| Mode | Without Agent Teams | With Agent Teams | Benefit | |------|-------------------|-----------------|---------| | Express | Sonnet direct call | N/A (overkill) | None: skip | | Lightweight | 3 sequential delegations | N/A (overhead exceeds benefit) | None: skip | | Full Council | 7 sequential/parallel delegations | 7 teammates with live inbox messaging | Experts can react to each other's COAs in real-time | | Delphi | Multiple delegation rounds | Persistent team iterates until convergence | No re-invocation cost per round; state preserved across rounds |

Rule of thumb: Use agent teams only for Full Council and Delphi modes. Lightweight and Express modes don't generate enough inter-expert traffic to justify the coordination overhead.

Team Configuration

# War Room agent team structure
Team: war-room-{session-id}
  Lead: supreme-commander (Opus) — orchestrates phases, final synthesis
  Teammates:
    chief-strategist (Sonnet) — approach generation
    intel-officer (Sonnet) — deep context analysis
    field-tactician (Sonnet) — implementation feasibility
    scout (Haiku) — rapid reconnaissance
    red-team (Sonnet) — adversarial challenge
    logistics (Haiku) — resource estimation

Note: In agent teams mode, all teammates run as Claude Code instances (Opus/Sonnet/Haiku). External LLM experts (Gemini, Qwen, GLM) are not used because agent teams requires the Claude CLI. The trade-off is losing model diversity but gaining real-time inter-expert messaging.

Deliberation Flow with Agent Teams

1. Lead creates team → spawns teammates in tmux panes
2. Phase 1 (Intel): Lead assigns intel tasks to scout and intel-officer via inbox
3. Phase 3 (COA): Lead broadcasts situation assessment; teammates develop COAs independently; messaging allows clarifying questions mid-development
4. Phase 4 (Red Team): Red-team teammate receives all COAs, posts challenges; other teammates can respond to challenges in real-time
5. Phase 5 (Voting): Lead broadcasts ballot; teammates rank via inbox messages
6. Phase 6 (Premortem): All teammates receive selected COA; can build on each other's failure scenarios
7. Phase 7 (Synthesis): Lead collects all artifacts, produces decision
8. Phase 8 (Discussion Publishing): After the Supreme Commander Decision document is finalized, you MUST execute modules/discussion-publishing.md to publish the decision to GitHub Discussions. Publishing is the default. The user can decline with "n". See the "Discussion Publishing (REQUIRED)" section below for the full step-by-step workflow.

Falling Back to Conjure Delegation

If agent teams fails (tmux unavailable, team creation error), the War Room automatically falls back to standard conjure delegation. The deliberation protocol is identical: only the execution backend differs.

Cost Considerations

Agent teams is significantly more token-intensive than conjure delegation (each teammate maintains its own context window). Use only when the coordination value justifies the cost, typically Delphi mode where multiple rounds of revision make persistent teammates worthwhile.

Discussion Publishing (REQUIRED)

After Phase 7 synthesis completes (in any execution mode), you MUST execute the discussion publishing workflow. This is not optional unless the user explicitly declines.

Execute these steps in order:

1. Read modules/discussion-publishing.md for the full GraphQL workflow
2. Ask the user: "Publishing this decision to GitHub Discussions. [Y/n]"
3. If the user says "n", skip to Related Skills. Otherwise proceed with steps 4-6.
4. Run the gh api graphql commands from the module to create a Discussion in the "Decisions" category
5. Post phase summaries as threaded comments on the Discussion
6. Update the local strategeion file with the Discussion URL

If GitHub Discussions are unavailable (non-GitHub platform, Discussions disabled, gh not authenticated), warn the user and skip. Publishing failures never block the war room workflow.

Exit Criteria

• [ ] A Reversibility Score and decision type are computed and recorded.
• [ ] A Supreme Commander Decision document with a selected approach, rationale, and dissenting views is produced.
• [ ] The decision is mirrored to docs/tradeoffs.md (and to a numbered ADR in docs/adr/ if architectural).
• [ ] Premortem watch points and, for Type 1 decisions, a reversal plan are captured.

Related Skills

• Skill(attune:project-brainstorming) - Pre-War Room ideation
• Skill(imbue:scope-guard) - Scope management
• Skill(imbue:rigorous-reasoning) - Reasoning methodology
• Skill(conjure:delegation-core) - Expert dispatch
• Skill(conjure:agent-teams) - Agent teams coordination (Full Council / Delphi)

Related Commands

• /attune:war-room - Invoke this skill
• /attune:brainstorm - Pre-War Room ideation
• /memory-palace:strategeion - Access War Room history

References

Strategic Foundations

• Sun Tzu - Art of War (intelligence gathering)
• Clausewitz - On War (friction and fog)
• Robert Greene - 33 Strategies of War (unity of command)
• MDMP - U.S. Army (structured decision process)
• Gary Klein - Premortem (failure mode analysis)
• Karpathy - LLM Council (anonymized peer review)

Reversibility Framework

• Jeff Bezos - Type 1 vs Type 2 Decisions (Amazon shareholder letters)
• Farnam Street - Reversible and Irreversible Decisions (STOP-LOP-KNOW framework)
• Tapan Desai - One-Way and Two-Way Door Decision-Making (practical application)