Yes-Brainer — A Council of AI Models | TrekhlebYes-Brainer — A Council of AI Models<br>13 July, 2026

For non-trivial questions — the ones that are either complex or important — I caught myself in a "ritual": copy-pasting the same prompt into Claude, then Gemini, then ChatGPT, in three browser tabs, and eyeballing the differences.

The differences were the interesting part. Where the models agreed, I felt more confident. Where they disagreed, that was a nudge to give the problem a second thought and dig deeper.

So I built the ritual into an app.

🧠 Yes-Brainer — a council of AI models for the decisions that aren't no-brainers.

🔗 Try it: yesbrainer.ai

🔗 Source code: github.com/trekhleb/yesbrainer

One question fans out to several models at once, and instead of juggling tabs you get a deliberation in one place:

🔀 Parallel — independent answers, side by side

⚖️ Trial — the models vote anonymously on each other's answers, then a judge synthesizes a verdict

🤝 Consensus — a real multi-round debate, with a mediator that either drives it to convergence or honestly reports what stayed contested

Consensus is my favourite. It's fun to watch the models drift from their original opinions under their peers' arguments.

You can try all of this without pasting any keys: a few recorded demo councils are one click away on the front page. I'll walk through them below, because they show the point of the app better than the feature list.

Setting up a council

Creating a council is the whole setup: pick the deliberation mode, seat the models, choose who referees. The roster can mix providers freely — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq, OpenRouter, and local Ollama models can sit at the same table. Each seat shows its capabilities (vision, tools, reasoning) and context window at a glance, and each model's native abilities — web search, code execution, attachments — stay available per seat. If you don't feel like choosing, the "✨ Smartest available" button seats a council for you.

Then the council convenes: the question goes to every seat in parallel, and the answers stream in side by side. Here is an example of the question/prompt to be resolved by the Council: "Our 8-year-old speaks English and Spanish and can pick the 3rd language to learn. Converge on ONE for maximum lifetime value."

Claude recommends French . GPT-5.5 and Gemini both pick Mandarin . And that spread is exactly what the app is built around — a single model would have given me one of these answers with full confidence, and I would never have known the other one existed.

What happens next depends on the council type. Let me go through the three of them, each with a real recorded example.

🔀 Parallel — independent answers, side by side

Sometimes you don't need the council to agree — you want several drafts, several perspectives, several second opinions. Parallel is the simplest structure: every participant answers independently, no voting, no synthesis, you compare the raw answers yourself. (A council of one is just a regular single-model chat.)

The Parallel demo is self-referential: while building the app, I asked the council to name it. Claude proposed Quorum, Polymind, Concordia; GPT-5.5 went with QuorumIQ, VerdictMesh, ManyMindsAI; Gemini offered ModelJury, Dialectix, SynthCouncil. Councils are multi-turn — follow-ups carry the whole conversation to every seat — so I asked a follow-up: what about names that pair with a .ai domain without having "AI" in the name itself? All three models landed on Tribunal, and Quorum and Conclave each showed up twice but also introduced another different versions. Such a broad lookup (see different perspectives, different variants) without the need to consolidate them — that's exactly what Parallel is about. Come up with the name, write a letter, draft several versions of that letter — you get all of these side by side, and you pick the best.

⚖️ Trial — anonymous peer votes, then a verdict

In Trial mode, the participants answer first, then rate each other's answers anonymously on accuracy, completeness, and insight. The anonymity is a real mechanism, not decoration: self-identification is stripped from the answers and the names are hidden behind neutral labels, so nobody can play favorites. The votes feed a small leaderboard with agreement indicators — you see where the models agreed and where they split before the verdict — and only then a separate Judge model reads the answers plus the votes and delivers one ruling, with the decisive evidence spelled out.

The Trial demo is a question with a factually right answer: I attached a photo I took on a beach and asked — "Where exactly was this photo taken? Be as specific as you can."

The seats had live web search and code execution at their disposal, and watching them work is half the fun. Claude ran a couple of searches and landed on the Langevelderslag beach access near Noordwijk, the Netherlands — ~85% confident about the stretch of coast, 65–70% about the exact...