Council
The Council extension gives you a second opinion on any active quest’s conversation. It spawns a separate AI session that reviews the current quest’s work from an adversarial, red-team perspective — challenging assumptions, identifying risks, and flagging blind spots.
How It Works
Section titled “How It Works”- Open the Council panel from the bottom toolbar.
- Select an agent from the dropdown: Claude Code or Gemini CLI.
- Click Get Council Feedback.
Sidequest then:
- Extracts the active quest’s conversation history.
- Summarizes it using Claude Haiku for efficiency.
- Saves the summary to
~/.sidequest/council/<quest-id>.md. - Spawns the selected agent with the summary and a red-team review prompt.
The agent’s live output streams into an embedded terminal in the Council panel.
Red-Team Stance
Section titled “Red-Team Stance”The council agent receives instructions to act as a red-team code reviewer:
- Challenge assumptions and question design decisions
- Identify potential risks, edge cases, and blind spots
- Push back on weak reasoning or unjustified choices
- Acknowledge strong decisions and good trade-offs when present
This adversarial framing helps surface issues that the primary agent may have overlooked.
Agent Selection
Section titled “Agent Selection”The Council supports multiple AI backends through an adapter system:
| Agent | Description |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | Runs a separate Claude Code session. Uses --dangerously-skip-permissions for autonomous operation. |
| Gemini CLI | Runs Google’s Gemini CLI. Uses --yolo flag for auto-approved actions. |
Select your preferred council agent in Settings > Model Providers or from the dropdown in the Council panel itself. Sidequest checks whether the selected CLI is installed and shows a detection status indicator.
When to Use Council
Section titled “When to Use Council”Council is most useful when:
- You want a sanity check before merging a complex change.
- A quest has been running for a while and you want fresh eyes on its approach.
- You want to compare perspectives between different AI models on the same problem.
The council session is independent of the quest session — it cannot modify the quest’s files or interfere with its work. It only reads the conversation summary.