Roundtable

Roundtable is a free, open-source folder of prompts and persona files. It turns one AI assistant into a panel of four to six critics. You give the panel a document, a problem or a decision. Each critic answers from its own point of view. A synthesis then sets out where they agree, where they split, and the one change that matters most.

Roundtable runs in any AI tool that reads an AGENTS.md file, such as Claude Cowork, Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. I released it on 4 June 2026 and added dispositions and team panels on 1 September 2026.

Get Roundtable Read the launch post

Who is Roundtable for?

People who write proposals, bids, reports and strategy papers with AI and have nobody to check the work before it leaves. Solo consultants first. Then small firms where one director reviews everything, and the team argues with the director's seniority instead of the director's point.

Why did I build Roundtable?

The AI that helps you write a document is the worst-placed reader to judge it.

In April 2026 I wrote about the agreement incentive. A Stanford study in Science found that AI models backed users' actions 49% more often than human advisors did, even when the action was harmful. Users preferred the flattering answers. Vendors had little reason to fix a trait their customers rewarded.

For a solo practitioner the AI is the whole room. Nobody pushes back before the proposal goes out. Shaw and Nave ran three randomised trials and found that 73% of people showed "cognitive surrender" to AI advice, even with cash for accuracy and instant feedback on errors. Telling yourself to challenge the AI fails at the moment you need it most: three hours into a draft, looking for reassurance.

In May I wrote The Yes-Man in the Room. Its argument: the session that helped you build a document has absorbed every choice you made, so its review tilts toward those choices. A fair review needs a reader who did not write the draft. Roundtable gives you four to six.

How has the problem changed since launch?

The flattery shrank and a new complaint took its place. Through mid-2026 vendors tuned their models to push back more, and some overshot. By August, users on r/ChatGPTcomplaints were asking how to get ChatGPT "to stop being a contrarian", in a forum that once filled with yes-man complaints.

A model that always agrees tells you about its training. So does a model that always objects. Either way you learn little about your document.

Roundtable copes with both because it seats opposed critics at one table. The Six Hats panel puts Richard, who hunts for failure, beside Aisha, who builds the case for value. The synthesis records their dissent, and you weigh it. I now call the job calibrated pushback: objections in proportion to the problem, each one specific enough to test.

Three more reasons for a panel showed up after launch.

Why does a written objection help?

Wade Foster, Zapier's CEO, told the My First Million podcast in August 2026 that his hiring panel heard his doubts about a candidate as the CEO throwing his weight around. His AI "War Council" turned the same vague doubt into a specific, written objection, and the panel debated that instead. An objection on the page has no job title attached. Your team can test it.

Do personas on one model disagree enough?

Less than they seem to. Sourati, Ziabari and Dehghani at USC reviewed the evidence in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2026): AI makes people's writing and reasoning more alike, and persona prompts leave much of that sameness in place. Mixing models helps. In 2023, UNC's ReConcile put ChatGPT, Bard and Claude 2 in one structured discussion and scored 79.0% on the StrategyQA benchmark, against 72.2% for three copies of ChatGPT. I plan to test Roundtable with a different model behind each critic.

Can a panel model my own team?

Yes, with care. Ray Dalio uses PrinciplesYou personality results to build teams of people who think differently. Since September, Roundtable can build a persona from a colleague's real role and domain, with their assessment result as the disposition. The disposition sets how they argue. The role sets what they know. Use it to rehearse a meeting before you circulate a proposal. Then hold the meeting.

How does Roundtable work?

You open the Roundtable folder in your AI tool and ask in plain English. Pick the workflow by what you have in hand.

Panel Feedback reviews a proposal, bid, article or landing page before you send it. Each critic scores it and lists its weaknesses from their angle.

Problem Solving treats your description of the problem as a hypothesis. The panel reframes it, maps root causes, and gives you steps in order.

Decision Making runs the panel as a board. The personas elect a Chair, cross-examine the options and reach a recommendation. Dissenting views go in the record.

Each workflow runs a fixed set of stages and ends in a synthesis. At the end, Roundtable saves the result as Markdown, Word or HTML.

Which panels come with it?

Five panels ship with Roundtable. Each one sorts its critics by a different principle.

• Six Hats: De Bono's six thinking modes, from facts and feelings to risk, value, new ideas and process.
• Stakeholder Map: the end user, a frontline worker, a middle manager, a regulator, a journalist and an investor. Use it when the people deciding are not the people affected.
• Time Horizons: six critics, from days to decades. Use it when this quarter's pressure fights next decade's position.
• Disciplines: economics, psychology, sociology, engineering, philosophy and history.
• Historical Figures: da Vinci, Curie, Douglass, Franklin, Lovelace and Marcus Aurelius. These personas draw on each figure's tradition. Marcus Aurelius has not reviewed his for accuracy.

Can I build my own panel?

Yes. Ask your AI: "Generate a persona for a senior NHS nurse for a Healthcare panel." You can add a disposition: "Add a CTO with a relentless, visionary streak." You can also mix critics from different panels. Four to six critics works best. Below four you lose coverage. Above six they repeat each other.

Who else uses AI panels and critics?

Others reached the same idea on their own. These are the closest matches I have found so far.

• Wade Foster, Zapier. His War Council has four standing critics (a ruthless CFO, a contrarian board member, a customer obsessive and a wartime operator), plus two or three made up for each question. Each states a position and bets $100 on it. The skill file states the goal: replace "the 'everyone in the room agrees with the boss' failure mode with a panel of advisors who are paid to disagree." (My First Million, 26 August 2026)
• Tobi Lütke, Shopify. His AI chief of staff convenes a council of five or six expert roles, each run on several models. Another model writes the synthesis. Lütke sees himself as the judge, because only a person can take responsibility for the decision. (The Knowledge Project)
• Peng Zheng, Grok Bot. She posts an idea into a group chat with a product bot, a design bot and an engineering bot, and lets them argue. (Peter Yang)
• Granola. Staff share a devil's advocate recipe, and a second recipe that reviews ideas the way the founder would. (Peter Yang, October 2026)
• Greg Isenberg. His agent graph for vetting startup ideas includes a skeptic that attacks weak findings, "because self-grading is worthless". (The Startup Ideas Podcast, 3 August 2026)
• Ethan Mollick, Wharton. "I have AI check all of my writing and roleplay different reader perspectives to see if I missed something important." (One Useful Thing)
• Liz Armistead, Dropbox. Dropbox runs synthetic research panels alongside real people, four or five times per creative cycle, with feedback in 48 hours. (Cannes Lions 2026)

What are Roundtable's limits?

Roundtable makes challenge a habit. It does not change how models are trained, and it can be wrong.

• One model, shared blind spots. Six personas on one model disagree less than six people would. Run the panel on a different model from the one that wrote the draft.
• Debate can run on. Leo Laporte retired a seat on his own agent council after two members "would go on for days debating a minor point" (TWiT AI User Group, September 2026). Roundtable's fixed stages and closing synthesis stop that.
• Synthetic people flatten variety. Lauren Leek warns that synthetic populations hit the average by suppressing the spread. Use panels for direction. Ask people for numbers.
• Your input goes to your model provider. Anything you paste goes to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or whoever runs your model. Check your client agreements first.
• The output is AI-generated. It may be incomplete or wrong. Treat it as input to your judgement, not professional advice.

How do I start?

1. Download or clone Roundtable.
2. Open the folder in Claude Cowork, Claude Code, Codex or another tool that reads AGENTS.md. If your tool does not read it, paste the contents of AGENTS.md into the chat.
3. Ask for a workflow: "Give me panel feedback on this proposal from the Stakeholder Map panel." Then paste your text or drop in the file.
4. Choose Markdown, Word or HTML. Roundtable saves the result in the _output folder.

The _exampleoutput folder holds one real session from each workflow, so you can see the output before you run it.

How would a firm use a panel of critics?

A small firm can run Roundtable as it is. Larger firms face different problems with the same task.

• Small firms (1 to 10 people) lack a reviewer. Roundtable fills that gap for free.
• Medium firms (50 to 200 people) have plenty of reviewers, each with a private standard. They need one shared set of panels and one review standard for bids and reports.
• Large firms (5,000 people or more) need proof. Panel reviews become part of output assurance, with a record of what each panel found, what dissent it logged and who signed off.

Roundtable's prompts and personas can move into your firm's own AI setup. Talk to me about Roundtable in your firm.

Questions people ask

Is Roundtable free?

Yes. Roundtable is free and open source, under the MIT licence. You pay only for the AI tool you run it in.

Which AI tools does Roundtable work with?

Any tool that reads AGENTS.md, such as Claude Cowork, Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. In other tools, paste AGENTS.md into the chat first.

Does Roundtable stop AI sycophancy?

It reduces the effect. The panel seats critics who disagree with each other, so neither flattery nor reflex objection decides the result. The model's training stays the same.

How many critics should a panel have?

Four to six.

Can I build a panel of my real colleagues?

Yes. Use each person's real role and their personality-assessment result as the disposition. Describe their temperament in your own words, and treat the session as a rehearsal. It predicts likely reactions, not what they will say.

Does Roundtable keep my documents private?

Roundtable has no server of its own. Your AI tool sends what you give it to that tool's model provider, under that provider's terms.

Sources

• Roundtable repository and README: github.com/associativetrails/roundtable
• Matt Perdeaux, The Agreement Incentive, 9 April 2026
• Matt Perdeaux, The Yes-Man in the Room, 14 May 2026
• Matt Perdeaux, Introducing Roundtable, 4 June 2026
• Stanford sycophancy study, Science: doi.org/10.1126/science.aec8352; Stanford news summary
• Shaw and Nave, cognitive surrender trials: SSRN 6097646
• Sourati, Ziabari and Dehghani, LLM homogenisation, Trends in Cognitive Sciences: cell.com
• Chen et al., ReConcile (UNC, 2023): arXiv 2309.13007
• Zapier War Council skill: github.com/zapier/wade-skills
• Lauren Leek, Temperature Zero for Culture
• Other people listed above: linked inline