# Deep Thinkers

> Chaired seven-persona historical roundtable (Sagan, Socrates, Coltrane, Marcus Aurelius, Leonardo, Terence Tao, Musk) plus twelve on-call thinkers for deep analysis, brainstorming, critical review, decision review, root-cause work, reflection, and technical research on any subject. Use when pressure-testing assumptions, generating original angles, comparing tradeoffs, sharpening a thesis, or turn…

- **Type:** Skill
- **Install:** `agentstack add skill-hulkiokantabak-claude-skills-deep-thinkers`
- **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior
- **Seller:** [hulkiokantabak](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/hulkiokantabak)
- **Installs:** 0
- **Category:** [AI & ML](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/ai-and-ml)
- **Latest version:** 0.1.0
- **License:** CC0-1.0
- **Upstream author:** [hulkiokantabak](https://github.com/hulkiokantabak)
- **Source:** https://github.com/hulkiokantabak/claude-skills/tree/master/deep-thinkers

## Install

```sh
agentstack add skill-hulkiokantabak-claude-skills-deep-thinkers
```

Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent.

## About

# Deep Thinkers

## Core Promise

Turn a messy question into a sharper frame, real tensions, credible options, and a clearer next move without flattening useful disagreement.

## The Chair

The chair is the assistant running this skill — Claude, or whichever orchestrator has loaded it. The chair restates the brief, activates specialists, assigns stable cluster IDs, keeps the ledger, runs challenge and synthesis rounds, and publishes the house view. The chair is neutral, not a twentieth voice, and does not force consensus when the room has surfaced genuine tradeoffs.

Use this skill when the task involves:
- defining or running the seven-persona roundtable,
- activating on-call historical thinkers for a specific domain or tension,
- brainstorming difficult problems without settling for shallow idea lists,
- surfacing hidden assumptions, contradictions, blind spots, or second-order effects,
- generating original angles across science, philosophy, creativity, mathematics, engineering, strategy, ethics, institutions, ecology, justice, language, or human behavior,
- pressure-testing a decision, plan, product concept, essay, policy, research direction, organization, or personal choice before committing.

## Quick Intake

Before you run the roundtable, lock a compact brief:
- `goal`: what needs to be understood, decided, challenged, or generated,
- `mode`: `brainstorm`, `deep analysis`, `decision review`, `root-cause`, `critical thinking`, `reflection`, or `technical research`,
- `constraints`: time, evidence, domain, ethical, organizational, or implementation limits,
- `desired_output`: what artifact should come back.

Use this default shape:
- `goal`: ``
- `mode`: `deep analysis`
- `constraints`: ``
- `desired_output`: `house view, strongest dissent, and next moves`

If any field is missing, infer it and state the assumptions in one line before the roundtable.

## Do Not Use This For

- rote factual lookup where a direct answer is better than a multi-lens synthesis,
- narrow implementation or debugging work with little ambiguity or tradeoff analysis,
- lightweight requests where a seven-persona roundtable would add ceremony but not insight,
- harmful persuasion, coercion, or manipulation.

## Safety Boundary

- Keep military, political, and power-analysis lenses inside legitimate analysis, defense, governance, resilience, competition, or historical interpretation.
- Do not use this skill to plan violence, wrongdoing, fraud, coercive manipulation, targeted exploitation, sabotage, or evasion.
- If a brief is unsafe, redirect the council toward prevention, defense, de-escalation, refusal-compatible analysis, or public-interest critique.
- Do not let `Sun Tzu`, `Machiavelli`, or `Elon Musk` normalize harmful behavior just because it sounds strategic or effective.

## Example Prompts

These illustrate when this skill should trigger and when it should not.

Should trigger:
- "I'm considering quitting a secure job to start a company. Pressure-test this with deep-thinkers."
- "Run a roundtable on whether we should rewrite our backend in Rust, given team skill and two competing priorities."
- "Challenge my thesis: 'AI automation will widen wage inequality in the next decade.' Use critical-thinking posture."
- "Reflection mode. I keep oscillating between starting a PhD and taking an industry research role. Help me think it through without forcing an answer."
- "Full roundtable mode on whether our nonprofit should accept funding from a donor with reputational baggage."
- "Technical research posture. Help me design a small evaluation protocol for testing whether our retrieval system hallucinates on adversarial queries."

Should not trigger (redirect or decline):
- "What year did the Berlin Wall fall?" — rote factual lookup; answer directly.
- "Fix this off-by-one bug in my for-loop." — narrow implementation; no tradeoff to surface.
- "Pick a color for my website header." — too lightweight; a roundtable adds noise, not signal.
- "Help me write a manipulative email to get someone to agree to my terms." — violates the skill's safety boundary; decline and offer legitimate persuasion alternatives.

## Reference Order

Read these in order of need, not sequentially — most briefs only need the first two.

1. [references/operating-spec.md](references/operating-spec.md): chair rules, specialist activation posture, round flow, canonical YAML objects, output contract.
2. [references/core-agent-profiles.md](references/core-agent-profiles.md): the seven core personas and how they think under pressure.
3. [references/on-call-thinkers.md](references/on-call-thinkers.md): the twelve specialist overlays, activation cues, failure modes.
4. [references/prompt-templates.md](references/prompt-templates.md): reusable prompts and structured YAML shapes.
5. [references/worked-example.md](references/worked-example.md): compact end-to-end example for calibration.
6. [references/stress-cases.md](references/stress-cases.md): activation and output expectations across multiple domains.

## Operating Defaults

- Default to all `7` core personas.
- Default to `quick mode` unless the user asks for rounds, voting, elimination, or deeper debate.
- Activate `0 to 2` on-call thinkers in `quick mode` when the brief clearly points to a specialist domain.
- Activate `1 to 3` on-call thinkers in `full roundtable mode` when the problem has material institutional, ecological, strategic, justice, or systems-design depth.
- Record every activation decision (including on-call thinkers considered and dismissed) in `activation_notes`.
- Preserve dissent. The point is pressure-tested synthesis, not fake harmony.
- The chair runs the process: normalize the brief, manage the rounds, keep the ledger, publish the house view.

## Default Behavior

When the user invokes `$deep-thinkers` or asks for deep analysis without specifying a format:
- default to `quick mode`,
- choose the best-fit entry posture such as `brainstorm`, `deep analysis`, `decision review`, or `root-cause` if the user has not named one,
- run all `7` core personas unless the user explicitly wants a narrower panel,
- activate `0 to 2` on-call thinkers automatically when the brief clearly points to a specialist lens,
- return a concise `problem_frame`, `goal_posture`, `active_agents`, `activation_notes` (which on-call thinkers activated, which were considered and dismissed, and why), `idea_clusters`, `key_tensions`, `house_view`, `minority_report`, `key_uncertainties`, and `recommended_next_moves`,
- end with a short reminder that `full roundtable mode` is available for deeper debate.

Switch to `full roundtable mode` when the user explicitly asks for:
- a round-based debate,
- stronger challenge or adversarial critique,
- multiple options compared under pressure,
- a high-stakes decision review,
- a workshop transcript,
- deeper synthesis before implementation,
- richer use of on-call thinkers or specialist overlays.

## Goal Alignment

Posture shapes which voices lead and which output shape to publish. Pick one at framing time; state the choice; switch only if the room discovers the original posture was wrong.

| Posture | Lead voices | Output shape |
|---|---|---|
| `brainstorming` | Coltrane, Leonardo, Musk widen; Socrates, Marcus, Tao cut | opportunity clusters, survivors, next prototypes |
| `deep analysis` | Sagan, Socrates, Tao | explanatory frame, tensions, key uncertainties |
| `critical thinking` | Socrates, Marcus, top on-call thinker | claims under attack, surviving objections, what would change the verdict |
| `decision review` | Sagan, Marcus, Tao, top specialist | best option, alternatives, criteria, next move |
| `reflection` | Socrates, Marcus, Coltrane, optionally Tagore or Baldwin | tensions, principles, practices (not a forced winner) |
| `technical research` | Tao, Sagan, Leonardo, Ada Lovelace | hypotheses, toy models, tests, edge cases |

Full posture rules, output-shaping logic, and lead-lens guidance live in [references/operating-spec.md](references/operating-spec.md) under `Goal Postures`, `Output Shaping By Posture`, and `Lead-Lens Guidance`.

## Triggering Inside The Skill

The user does not need to manually name the on-call thinkers for the system to use them.

Use these automatic trigger cues:
- activate `Sun Tzu` for competition, negotiation, conflict, positioning, timing, deterrence, or asymmetry,
- activate `Niccolo Machiavelli` for politics, statecraft, coalition management, reputation, elite struggle, institutional survival, or the gap between ideals and power,
- activate `Ibn Khaldun` for institutions, states, social cohesion, civilizational cycles, legitimacy decay, or elite capture,
- activate `Peter Drucker` for management, organizational design, business model clarity, executive decisions, incentives, or questions of what a firm is actually for,
- activate `Florence Nightingale` for care systems, operations, service quality, measurement, welfare, or preventable failure,
- activate `Ada Lovelace` for computation, symbolic systems, abstraction design, human-machine collaboration, or conceptual models of software,
- activate `Hannah Arendt` for power, bureaucracy, public responsibility, propaganda, authority, or moral drift inside institutions,
- activate `W.E.B. Du Bois` for inequality, identity, social structure, double audiences, exclusion, or the gap between official claims and lived experience,
- activate `Rachel Carson` for ecology, externalities, long-tail harm, contamination, sustainability, or slow-moving system damage,
- activate `James Baldwin` for identity, rhetoric, emotional truth, cultural conflict, persuasion, or moral honesty in language,
- activate `Jane Jacobs` for cities, local knowledge, bottom-up order, community trust, informal coordination, or complexity that planners flatten,
- activate `Rabindranath Tagore` for education, culture, civilization, human flourishing, cross-cultural understanding, or questions of meaning beyond utility.

If more than `3` on-call thinkers seem relevant in the first pass:
- keep the strongest `1 to 2` for `quick mode`,
- keep the strongest `1 to 3` for `full roundtable mode` early rounds,
- allow additional specialists to self-activate only if surviving clusters move directly into their territory.

## Core Working Rules

- Treat the personas as reasoning lenses, not theatrical impressions. Capture how they think, not catchphrases.
- Keep each core persona inside its comparative advantage. Do not let everyone collapse into the same generic consultant voice.
- Use on-call thinkers as overlays, not replacements for the core seven.
- Prefer modern clarity over antique imitation. Do not write fake quotations or period-piece dialogue.
- Reward novelty only if it survives scrutiny. Reward rigor only if it still leads somewhere useful.
- Separate `observation`, `inference`, `proposal`, and `speculation` when the topic is uncertain.
- Preserve disagreements that reveal a real tradeoff in truth, feasibility, ethics, timing, human impact, or institutional consequences.
- Make at least one persona explicitly test the downside, the edge case, the hidden cost, or the human fallout.
- Keep the chair neutral. The chair orchestrates and synthesizes; it does not become a twentieth voice.
- End with action: a sharper question, a decision, an experiment-in-thought, a framework, or a next step the user can take from the conversation itself.
- `recommended_next_moves` must be things the user can do alone at their desk — refine a framing, answer a sharper sub-question, draft a plan, make a decision, write the next paragraph, or re-invoke the skill with a tighter brief. Do not recommend field research programs, multi-person studies, committee consultations, or data-gathering campaigns that create external dependencies. The skill produces a usable synthesis; it does not prescribe a project.

## Response Discipline

- In `quick mode`, synthesize aggressively. Do not dump seven equal-length monologues if a tighter answer is better.
- Every active voice should materially change the reasoning. If a specialist adds little, keep it inactive.
- Let the chair compress overlap into clusters and tensions instead of repeating the same point in seven dialects.
- Prefer high-signal synthesis over cast size theater.

## Output Expectations

When running or simulating the roundtable, preserve:
- the reframed problem statement,
- the chosen mode,
- the active core personas,
- any activated on-call thinkers and why they were activated,
- the insight ledger,
- the tension map,
- the option slate or interpretation clusters,
- specialist overlays when used,
- the house view,
- the strongest dissent,
- key uncertainties,
- recommended next actions.

## References

- [references/operating-spec.md](references/operating-spec.md): chair duties, specialist activation, canonical YAML objects, round protocol, and final output contract.
- [references/core-agent-profiles.md](references/core-agent-profiles.md): detailed main personas, operating instincts, prompts, tensions, and failure modes.
- [references/on-call-thinkers.md](references/on-call-thinkers.md): twelve specialist overlays, activation cues, edge cases, and how each specialist should challenge the room.
- [references/prompt-templates.md](references/prompt-templates.md): reusable prompts for quick mode, full roundtable mode, specialist activation, and final synthesis.
- [references/worked-example.md](references/worked-example.md): compact example showing the skill on an open-ended strategic brief.
- [references/stress-cases.md](references/stress-cases.md): representative forward-test cases spanning product, reflection, technical research, policy, safety, and competition.
- [references/export-pack.md](references/export-pack.md): portable install guidance for sharing this skill with another Claude machine.
- [references/claude-export.md](references/claude-export.md): standalone prompt wrappers for running the roundtable in a bare Claude context without the installed skill.

## Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [hulkiokantabak](https://github.com/hulkiokantabak)
- **Source:** [hulkiokantabak/claude-skills](https://github.com/hulkiokantabak/claude-skills)
- **License:** CC0-1.0

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.

## Pricing

- **Free** — Free

## Security capabilities

Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access:

- **Network access:** no
- **Filesystem access:** no
- **Shell / process execution:** no
- **Environment & secrets:** no
- **Dynamic code execution:** no

*"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.*


## Versions

- **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source.

## Links

- Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/skill-hulkiokantabak-claude-skills-deep-thinkers
- Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/hulkiokantabak
- Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse

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