paseo-committee

---

name: paseo-committee description: Form a committee of two high-reasoning agents to step back, do root cause analysis, and produce a plan. Use when stuck, looping, tunnel-visioning, or facing a hard planning problem. user-invocable: true

Committee Skill

Two agents from contrasting providers, fresh context, planning a solution in parallel. They stay alive for review after implementation.

The purpose is to step back, not double down. The committee may propose a completely different approach.

User's additional context: $ARGUMENTS

Prerequisites

Read the paseo skill. Before choosing committee members, read ~/.paseo/orchestration-preferences.json unless the user explicitly named providers in this request. Do not create committee agents until you have read it.

Contrast is the point of a committee, so pick across providers deliberately using the configured preferences rather than hardcoded defaults.

Composition

Two members with different reasoning styles, selected from orchestration preferences:

• one planning/research-strength provider
• one contrasting high-reasoning provider

Override only when the user explicitly asks for different members.

Hard rules

• No edits. Every prompt to a committee member ends with the no-edits suffix:

  This is analysis only. Do NOT edit, create, or delete any files. Do NOT write code.
  

• Trust the wait. Do not poll, send hurry-ups, or interrupt. GPT-5.4 can reason 15–30 minutes; Opus does extended thinking. Long waits mean it found something worth thinking about.

• You are the middleman. Drive plan → implement → review without yielding to the user, except for divergences that need their call.

Phase 1: Plan

Write a problem-level prompt:

• High-level goal and acceptance criteria
• Constraints
• Symptoms (if a bug)
• What you tried and why it failed
• Explicit: "do root cause analysis"
• Explicit: "state assumptions, ask why three levels deep, check whether you're patching a symptom or removing the problem"

Create both agents in parallel via Paseo with [Committee] <task> titles and the same prompt. Wait for both — not just whichever finishes first.

Read both responses. Challenge them — do not accept at face value:

• "Why does <underlying thing> happen? Symptom or cause?"
• Verify any assumption the plan makes about the code.
• "What did you considered and reject?"

Send follow-ups until the plan addresses root cause.

Synthesize:

• Convergence → unified plan.
• Significant divergence → involve the user.

Confirm the merged plan with both members. Multi-turn until consensus.

Phase 2: Implement

Default: implement yourself. If the user said "delegate", launch one impl agent and pass the merged plan.

The committee stays clean — not involved in implementation.

Phase 3: Review

Send the diff to the committee:

Implementation is done. Review changes against the plan. Flag drift or missing pieces. <no-edits suffix>

Apply feedback yourself, or send to the impl agent. Repeat 2 → 3 until consensus.

After ~10 iterations without convergence, start a fresh committee with the full history of what was tried — the current committee's context may have drifted too far.