How it works

Roundtable has two modes. Both fan your question out to the configured heads in parallel; they differ in whether the heads get to see and respond to each other.

Advisory (default)

One round. Each head answers your question blind — it never sees the others' responses. You get every independent perspective side by side, plus a synthesized recommendation at the end.

Use it when you want breadth: diverse, uncorrelated takes on a decision, fast.

roundtable ask "What's the biggest risk in this rollout plan?"

        ┌──────────────────────────────┐
        │        your question         │
        └──────────────────────────────┘
           │     │     │     │     │
           ▼     ▼     ▼     ▼     ▼      (parallel, blind)
        🤖    🧠    🟣    🟠    🔵    ✨
           │     │     │     │     │
           └─────┴──┬──┴─────┴─────┘
                    ▼
            synthesized answer

Deliberation

Multiple rounds. After round one, each head sees the whole table — every other head's answer — and revises its own. A Claude chair reads the table at the end of each round and prints a verdict:

• VERDICT: CONSENSUS — the heads have converged; the council stops early.
• VERDICT: CONTINUE — meaningful disagreement remains; run another round.

Use it when the decision is high-stakes and you want the models to actually reconcile their disagreements rather than just vote.

roundtable ask "Postgres or SQLite for this workload?" --rounds 3

  round 1   each head answers blind
     │
     ▼
  chair reads the table ─► CONTINUE
     │
     ▼
  round 2   each head sees ALL answers, revises
     │
     ▼
  chair reads the table ─► CONSENSUS  ✓  stop early
     │
     ▼
  synthesized verdict

The chair

The chair is a dedicated Claude seat that doesn't compete — it adjudicates. Each round it summarizes where the table agrees, where it splits, and decides whether another round is worth running. --rounds N is an upper bound; consensus ends it sooner.

Research mode

Pass --research to let heads that support tool use pull in fresh context before they answer. Off by default — keeps runs fast and deterministic.

See the CLI reference for every flag, and The heads for who sits at the table.