LLM Council Template

A template for running multi-perspective LLM deliberations using personality-based system prompting. Based on karpathy/llm-council, modified to use a single LLM with different "thinking personalities" rather than multiple model providers.

How It Works

Instead of querying different LLM providers, this template defines six council members differentiated by system prompts:

Member	Thinking Style
Logical Thinker	Analytical, structured, evidence-based reasoning
Creative Problem Solver	Lateral thinking, unexpected analogies, novel angles
Pessimist	Risk identification, failure modes, worst-case scenarios
Optimist	Opportunity focus, best-case scenarios, momentum building
Connecting The Dots Specialist	Pattern recognition, systems thinking, second-order effects
Unconventional Solutions Ideator	Contrarian thinking, first-principles, radical simplification

The deliberation follows three stages:

1. Stage 1: Individual Perspectives -- Each personality responds to the query independently
2. Stage 2: Peer Review -- Each personality evaluates and ranks the anonymized responses
3. Stage 3: Chairman Synthesis -- A chairman role synthesizes all perspectives into a final answer

Digest Outputs

After deliberation, you can generate two digest formats:

• PDF Report -- A formatted Typst document with all stages, rankings, and the final synthesis
• Personal Podcast -- An LLM-written podcast script converted to audio via Microsoft Edge TTS, delivered as a personal briefing addressed to you

Setup

1. Install Dependencies

Requires uv for Python and Node.js for the frontend.

uv sync
cd frontend && npm install && cd ..

2. Configure API Key

Create a .env file in the project root:

OPENROUTER_API_KEY=sk-or-v1-...

Get your API key at openrouter.ai.

3. Configure Model (Optional)

Set the base model and chairman model via environment variables in .env:

COUNCIL_MODEL=anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5
CHAIRMAN_MODEL=anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5

Or edit backend/config.py to customize the council personalities.

4. Optional: Install Typst and Edge TTS

For PDF report generation:

# Install Typst (see https://github.com/typst/typst)
cargo install typst-cli
# or via package manager

For podcast audio generation:

pip install edge-tts

Running

./start.sh

Or manually:

# Terminal 1 - Backend
uv run python -m backend.main

# Terminal 2 - Frontend
cd frontend && npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser.

Tech Stack

• Backend: FastAPI, async httpx, OpenRouter API
• Frontend: React + Vite, react-markdown
• PDF Generation: Typst
• Audio Generation: Microsoft Edge TTS (edge-tts)
• Storage: JSON files in data/conversations/

Attribution

Based on karpathy/llm-council by Andrej Karpathy.