llm-council — external-tools review layer

Overview

Wraps pr-council-review (unchanged) and adds a layer of external CLI coding agents (codex, plus Antigravity — the agy harness) as additional independent reviewers, then folds their verdicts into the same synthesis. Internal Claude subagents are independent per-dimension but share one model family's blind spots — a phrasing choice, a Windows-vs-POSIX nuance, or a syntax error that reads fine to one Claude reviewer reads fine to all of them. A different model family catches a different error distribution. Confirmed live: on one review, external tools caught 6 real, distinct issues (a wording-accuracy bug, a wrong test count, a Windows-only test-triviality nuance, a test-isolation gap, a missing test, a malformed markdown fence) that 12 internal Claude-subagent dispatches (6 dimensions × 2 rounds) had all missed.

When to Use

• Any pr-council-review run (PR# mode or branch mode) where the artifact is high-stakes enough to want a second, differently-biased opinion before calling it GREEN.
• Not needed for a quick spot-check or draft iteration — use /review (single-agent) for that; pr-council-review alone for a normal-stakes PR.

Quick Reference — Tiers

Tier controls tool breadth, not review rounds. Fix → re-verify → repeat until GREEN (or a round cap) happens at every tier — that's how council review works, not a tier knob.

Tool Registry

Fixed, tested invocation recipes. Do not improvise a command for a listed tool — the "obvious" invocation is often a trap (see codex below).

codex

• NEVER codex review. Its built-in prompt has gotten stuck in a self-inflicted loop reading skill files via a malformed PowerShell command, then retrying the identical broken command for 20+ minutes with zero progress. Confirmed reproducible on a clean retry.
• Use: codex exec -s read-only -C <absolute-repo-dir> --skip-git-repo-check "<direct, fully self-contained prompt>".
• Probe: codex --version (near-instant; confirms binary health only, not auth/quota).
• Timeout budget: real calls run 10-20 min at default (xhigh) reasoning effort. Always background it — never block synchronously.
• Orphan risk: a killed/timed-out codex exec can leave codex.exe / codex-code-mode-host.exe / sandbox-helper processes running on Windows. After any kill, verify via tasklist/ps that the named PIDs are actually gone before retrying — a retry racing an orphan still writing the same output path silently corrupts the result.

Antigravity (agy)

• What it is: Google's Antigravity harness, invoked via agy. It supplies the high-tier's second, different-model-family opinion.
• Working recipe (verified 2026-08-27): agy --model <model> --mode plan --dangerously-skip-permissions --add-dir <absolute-repo-dir> --print-timeout 15m -p "<prompt>". --mode plan is what makes the permission flag acceptable: the agent gets reads, not writes. Verify the worktree is unmodified afterwards (git status) — on the run that produced this note, it was.
• Do NOT use --agent <gsd-*> --new-project. That was the previous recipe and it terminates with a bare Error: Agent execution terminated due to error. — this was misdiagnosed here as quota exhaustion for months.
• Probe: agy models — not agy --version. The version check only proves the binary exists; agy models exercises auth and returns the model list (Gemini 3.x Pro/Flash, Claude, GPT-OSS), which is what you actually need to know.
• The failure mode is permissions, not quota. Headless mode cannot prompt, so tool requests are auto-denied and the run returns no output at all: a tool required the "command" permission that headless mode cannot prompt for, so it was auto-denied. Three separate runs failed three different ways before this surfaced; each error named the next problem, so read the actual message rather than assuming quota.
• If it's genuinely unavailable: don't silently retry past its probe. Suggest installing it, or substitute another external CLI coding agent, and continue best-effort with whatever did return; never block the whole round on it. Note that the gemini CLI is not a valid substitute for individual accounts — it now returns IneligibleTierError: This client is no longer supported for Gemini Code Assist for individuals, and it fails that way after passing a --version probe.

Dispatch Flow

1. Resolve tier → tool list.
2. Probe every resolved tool in parallel, short timeout (~10-15s). A tool that doesn't respond is excluded from this round — name it in the report, don't just drop it silently. The probe only catches binary-health failures (not installed, hung shell); a quota-exhausted tool can still pass the probe and fail on the real call — that's what the dispatch-layer disclosure step below is for.
3. Dispatch pr-council-review (unchanged) for the internal dimension council.
4. In parallel, dispatch each surviving external tool via its registry recipe, backgrounded.
5. Fold each returning verdict into the same synthesis table pr-council-review produces — same GREEN/YELLOW/RED vocabulary, tagged by source (e.g. D3 (internal) vs codex (external)). A tool that fails or times out after passing its probe is dropped from this round with an explicit note in the report. Never silently drop, never block the whole round on one flaky tool.
6. Any finding — internal or external — that warrants a fix gets applied, then re-verified against the specific dimension/tool that flagged it (not necessarily the whole pool again).
7. Report: pr-council-review's existing shape, plus an "External tools" line noting which ran / were skipped / failed and why.

Common Mistakes

Cross-References

REQUIRED SUB-SKILL: the internal council dispatch is pr-council-review (skills/pr-council-review/SKILL.md) — this skill does not reimplement dimension detection, synthesis rules, or report shape, it wraps them.