Jun 10 • 💬 General discussion
Your AI expert council is probably making worse decisions than a single prompt
Everyone's stacking AI experts into "councils" right now. Here's what nobody
mentions: most of them produce blander advice than a single good prompt.
I've been building multi-agent systems for a while, and the council pattern is
seductive. Load six marketing legends, let them debate, synthesize the genius.
Three things I learned the hard way:
1. Councils regress to the mean. Put Cialdini, Godin, and Vaynerchuk in a room and
"synthesize" their answers and you get generic marketing advice wearing three
nametags. The fix isn't a better synthesizer. Stop resolving the disagreement.
Let the tension stand and make one agent own the call.
2. The debate is where your budget dies. Distilling a book into a tight skill file
is cheap. Having agents argue in real time is not. If "minimal tokens" is your
pitch, the preprocessing is doing the work and the roundtable is the luxury.
3. It doesn't make the model smarter. Cold Claude already does a soft version of
all of this. What the structure buys you is named, sharp, predictable behavior.
Say that honestly — the moment you claim it makes the AI "smarter," you've oversold
it.
None of this means don't build councils. It means build them with your eyes open.
The real test for any council: do your experts actually disagree, or do they just
agree in different vocabulary? If it's the second, you built one expert and gave
it six hats.
(Riffing off the systems thread from that highlighted for us and the 'systems' build — good work worth pressure-testing.)
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Your AI expert council is probably making worse decisions than a single prompt
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