// boot room labs · now incubating · alpha
Five advisors who disagree with each other, in every decision that matters.
The AI you already pay for agrees with you. The M3S Council makes it argue. Five seats take opposite sides of your decision, three anonymous reviewers grade them, and a chairman gives you a verdict with a bet on it. Ten minutes. One file. Free.
// why it stood the test of time
We did not invent this. We just made it cheap.
Rome's emperors kept a consilium, a standing circle of advisors who argued a matter before the emperor ruled. English kings kept a Privy Council for the same reason. Venice ran a republic for centuries on councils built to stop any one man from deciding alone.
For four hundred years the Church paid a lawyer to argue against every saint. The devil's advocate, created in 1587. In 1983 the role was stripped of its power, and one pope then canonized more saints than the previous four centuries combined. Correlation, not proof, but the room did start saying yes.
Lincoln put the three men who ran against him in his cabinet. The men who approved the Bay of Pigs handled the Cuban Missile Crisis eighteen months later; the difference was not the men, it was that the President left the room so they would argue before he decided. The word for the failure mode he escaped, groupthink, came out of studying exactly those two rooms.
Every version that worked shares the same small set of mechanisms. Independent testimony before discussion. Assigned dissent. Anonymity where status would bend the answer. A presiding officer who decides last and does not average. The intelligence world calls it a red team. Quakers call it a clearness committee. Founders who can afford it call it a peer group and pay five figures a year for the room.
What changed is the cost. The advisors are now free, tireless, and available at two in the morning. The problem is that the one you already talk to is agreeable by design. Ask it whether your idea is good and it will find the good in it.
A council fixes that by construction. That is the whole product.
Twelve lines of that history, with sources, are in the repo (HISTORY.md), from Athens choosing its council by lot to Anthropic measuring sycophancy in a quarter of guidance conversations in 2026. Zapier's War Council and Andrej Karpathy's LLM Council are the two open-source versions that made this pattern popular in the last year; ours is built for founders and operators of privately held companies, with a partnerships and business-development edge.
// the m3s council
Five seats. Opposing jobs. One verdict.
Each seat reasons by its own method, answers without seeing the others, and places a $100 bet across your options. Three anonymous reviewers grade the answers, and one of them is ordered to attack the consensus. The chairman decides, and bets too.
Role reversal
The Counterparty
Whoever has to say yes for this to work, arguing from their side.
Pre-mortem
The Contrarian
Assumes it already failed and works back to why.
Unit economics
The CFO
Year one and year two, in numbers, before forming a view.
Execution backcast
The Operator
What happens Monday morning, and who owns it.
Case comparison
The Precedent
How decisions like this went before. Connected to M3S Atlas, it pulls real partnership precedent.
Use it for a partnership or channel deal, a pricing change, a hire or fractional versus full-time, a new market, an acquisition or a sale, a product bet, a vendor contract, a raise. If a decision would get its own meeting, the council should have a say. Not for fact lookups; it refuses those.
// try it
Three ways in. Pick the one that matches your Tuesday.
1 · The file
Paste it into what you already use.
One markdown file. Claude Project, custom GPT, Gemini Gem, or a skills folder for Codex and Cursor. Fill the six-line template at the top and say convene the council.
Get the file →Repo, seats, and per-platform steps →
2 · The connection
Connect M3S Atlas to your AI.
For the slightly more technical. One URL, added as a custom connector in Claude, in ChatGPT's developer mode, or in any tool that speaks MCP. Same council, plus the Precedent seat gets the Atlas frameworks and, as the case library fills, real partnership precedent. Read-only. Metadata-only logging.
https://m3s-atlas-mcp.dr-5bb.workers.dev/mcp/alpha-m3s-2026
Connection steps per platform →3 · With us
We install it with you. Twenty minutes.
We set it up in your stack, run your first real decision through it on the call, and leave you with the file. No charge for Florida founders and operators through the end of 2026. Bring the decision you are avoiding.
Book twenty minutes →// your first council
Fill six lines. Say the words.
Decision: Options on the table: Who is on the other side and what do they want: What is already agreed or committed: What I am unsure about: What it costs if I am wrong:
Then: "Convene the council." Read the verdict. Argue with it. Bring the council to the next one. Example prompts: "Council this: should we take the exclusive reseller deal?" · "Convene the council on hiring a VP of Partnerships versus going fractional." · "Council the pricing change before Thursday's board call."
// what you can change
Remix the seats. Keep the machinery.
Change freely: the rotating seats (counsel, a vertical specialist, the customer, the board, the integrator, comms), the frameworks you add, the input template, the bet currency. Write your own seat; the repo has a folder for it.
Keep, because the evidence says it is what makes a council work: seats answer without seeing each other, reviewers see shuffled anonymous answers, one reviewer attacks the consensus, the chairman decides rather than averages, and facts are not put to a vote.
What it is not: it does not know your numbers unless you give them, and it does not replace counsel, your board, or your own judgment. It makes the disagreement happen before the meeting instead of after the decision.
// alpha, honestly
Feedback is the price.
Privacy. The file runs entirely in your AI; nothing reaches us. The hosted connection is read-only, needs no account, and logs metadata only (time, tool, length, vertical). Your question text is never stored unless you opt in.
What we ask. Tell us what it got wrong, which seat you would fire, which seat is missing, and what you ran through it. Issues on the repo, or [email protected]. We run every proposed change through the council before it lands.
Go further. The council is free and stays free. When you want the seats tuned to your business, your partner history, and your quarter, that is what M3S does: we design the revenue infrastructure and stay until it runs without you needing us. Talk to us →
M3S Councils is an alpha from Boot Room Labs, the incubation arm of Middle 3rd Solutions. Built on M3S Atlas. Prose CC BY 4.0, code Apache-2.0. A thinking tool, not professional advice.