A pre-registered analysis of multi-agent consensus found no significant benefit (+3.9 points, 95% CI [−2.7, +10.6], p = 0.247). What survived that result is Escalation-Gated Retry: try once, and only after two consecutive test failures, feed the real failure back and try again with a fresh perspective.
Earned Consensus started as Absolute Self-Governance (ASG), a multi-agent orchestrator: a council of role-based agents voted on which roles a software task needed, team size was dimensioned from measured task complexity, and specialist perspectives executed against a repository's own tests. It was built, benchmarked across five sweeps and a 589-round pre-registered study, and then renamed and reduced to what the evidence actually supported. Consensus, when it happens at all, is earned by evidence of failure — never assumed by default.
Read the full paper for the design rationale and the complete measurement record, or skip straight to the skill.
One skill, model-agnostic, that runs Escalation-Gated Retry directly.
skills/— no server, no API key, no Docker, no subagent tool required. Point Claude Code, or any agentskills.io-compatible assistant, at itsSKILL.md. For a host that expects skills under its own path (e.g. Claude Code's.claude/skills/), copy or symlink this directory there.
Everything that didn't survive contact with the evidence — a roster vote, a parallel swarm, a hosted service — is cut.
The orchestrator's own results argued against keeping it. Always-on consensus lost to a single agent until the pipeline was rebuilt around a retry-with-feedback loop (paper §4); the roster-vote mechanism it was named for produced a difference indistinguishable from zero under pre-registration (paper §2); a team-size probe found agents agree on where a fix belongs far more than how to phrase it, so a parallel voting swarm added cost, not signal (paper §5). What was left after removing everything the evidence didn't support was a solo-first, escalate-on-failure procedure with no server-side component at all — so it became a skill, not a service.
The original runtime, its raw telemetry, its design and pre-registration
documents, and this paper's own build pipeline are preserved at the
v0.1.9-full-runtime git tag in this repository's history — not on the
current default branch:
git checkout v0.1.9-full-runtimeThat checkout predates the rename; everything in it still refers to itself as Absolute Self-Governance / ASG, which is accurate for what it was at the time.
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
MIT — see LICENSE.