Mitchell Agentic Sprint

AI-led 6-step sprint that walks an AI builder through validating one idea — vertical, buyers, framework, positioning — to a sales deck, outreach plan, and pre-seed investor deck. Adversarial by default. Output is artifacts, not product.

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ADR-004: Mini Council as Five New SKILL.md NPC Agents

Field Value
Decision ID ADR-004
Initiative Mini Council adversarial layer
Proposed By Chris Barlow
Date 2026-05-08
Status Accepted

WH(Y) Decision Statement

In the context of the concept’s “Mini Council” of five skeptical personas (seed VC, churned customer, competitor founder, future-self, grumpy PM) that tear up the user’s idea between Steps 1→2 and Steps 4→5 to refuse flattery and force specificity per concept §6,

facing the choice of how to implement these five voices — as profile-pack skins on existing campaign-mode NPCs (Dragon, Cat, Owl), or as net-new SKILL.md NPC agents in MAS,

we decided for five new SKILL.md NPC agents (seed-vc-agent, churned-customer-agent, competitor-founder-agent, future-self-agent, grumpy-pm-agent), each with embedded domain heuristics, sharing a Mini Council Conventions section that lifts the voice/tone preamble verbatim from campaign-mode/skills/dragon-agent/SKILL.md lines 88–96,

and neglected profile-pack-only re-skinning of Dragon (cannot encode domain heuristics — a re-skinned Dragon “speaks in VC vocabulary” but doesn’t “reason about unit economics”; gap analysis §2 confirmed profile packs only override skin-name and emoji), single composite “Council” agent that role-plays all five (loses voice differentiation, blends identities — explicitly forbidden by campaign-mode CLAUDE.md identity rules), and reusing six-animals as Council members (psychological archetypes are present-tense behavioural advisors, not domain-knowledgeable expert personas with temporal/emotional framings),

to achieve real domain depth in each voice (Seed VC actually knows 2026 inference economics; Churned Customer actually frames retrospective regret; Future-Self actually applies temporal hindsight), maximum context isolation per voice (each voice receives the user’s state but not other voices’ transcripts), and verifiable voice differentiation through worked-example review per ADR-010,

accepting that five new SKILL.md files is more code surface than a single profile pack, each voice needs prompt iteration to feel distinct (mitigated by shared Mini Council Conventions section that DRYs the conventions while letting each voice diverge on heuristics), and the Mini Council is independent of campaign-mode’s Council animal-advisory layer (these are MAS-specific).

Options Considered

Option Verdict
Five new SKILL.md NPC agents (Selected) Real domain depth; isolated voices; verifiable differentiation
Profile-pack-only re-skin of Dragon × 5 Rejected — profile packs cannot add heuristics; gap analysis §2
Single composite “Council” agent Rejected — loses voice differentiation; blends identities
Reuse six-animals as Council Rejected — wrong archetype kind (behavioural vs expert/emotional)

Dependencies

Relationship ADR ID Title Notes
Implements ADR-002 Build tier Moderate-tier requirement
Refines ADR-003 Sibling-plugin shape Council voices live in our skills/ directory
Reuses (external) campaign-mode dragon-agent voice/tone Lifted via Protocol 12 (DRY)

References

Reference ID Title Location
SPEC-004-A Mini Council SKILL.md Format specs/SPEC-004-A-Mini-Council-Skill-Format.md
Concept Mitchell Agentic Sprint concept §6 docs/concept/concept.md
Research Gap analysis §2 (Mini Council depth) docs/research/gap-analysis.md
Source campaign-mode dragon-agent voice/tone github.com/cgbarlow/campaign-mode

Status History

Status Approver Date
Accepted Chris Barlow 2026-05-08