Gilly quorums

Gilly helps you make a judgment with a multi-round collaboration overseen by a moderator agent. You give it a precise prompt; a panel considers the evidence, challenges early conclusions, and returns a verdict with the reasoning behind it. A quorum is the saved collaboration and its resulting verdict.

Gilly selects the panel to give you the best practical mix of quality, cost, and speed. You do not need to choose individual models to get started. In the future, paid plans will let you move those levers to favor the trade-off that matters most to your work.

Choose the answer shape

Use the type that matches the decision you need to make. The prompt supplies the subject; the type supplies the shape of the answer.

For a selection quorum, give Gilly the real alternatives. For a numeric prediction, name the unit. A freeform quorum asks for nothing but the question. In every type, add the context and constraints that would change a careful answer.

A freeform quorum still ends in a definite shape — you simply do not have to pick it. The panel answers in its own words first, Gilly groups those answers, and the verdict tells you which of six shapes the question turned out to be: a probability, a numeric estimate, a selection, a set of answers, a ranking, or a written answer. The second round is a vote over the grouped answers, so the result is a panel judgment rather than one panelist's essay. Nobody's answer is dropped along the way: when there are too many to fit one ballot, similar answers are grouped further and the verdict says so.

Give time-bound questions a deadline

A deadline turns many useful prompts into questions that can be checked. It keeps a forecast from quietly changing meaning as time passes, gives the panel an agreed point of reference, and makes the eventual verdict easier to assess.

Include the deadline in the prompt itself. For example:

• Probability: “Will the vendor complete security review by **15 September

2026**?”

• Numeric prediction: “How many support tickets will we receive in the week

ending 30 November 2026?”

• Selection: “Which contract option is the best fit for our needs through

the 2027 renewal?”

• Freeform: “Which suppliers will still be able to serve us **through the

first half of 2027**, and why?”

Not every decision needs a deadline. A comparison of stable options can stand on its own. Add one whenever the answer depends on a future result, a period of measurement, or a decision window.

In a freeform quorum the wording carries more of this weight than elsewhere. You declare no shape, so there is no unit or option list to pin the question down, and the pre-flight check has no shape to check the question against. If the answer depends on a date or a period, put it in the sentence.

Sharing and plans

Public quorums share their prompts and completed verdicts, so keep confidential information out of them. Private Standard quorums require a plan that includes private quorums. Premium quorums retain their own privacy entitlement. Quorums using mounted source context always stay private.

Making an existing public quorum private is permanent. Gilly asks you to confirm that all discussion comments and community votes will be discarded and that the quorum cannot be made public again. The panel's verdict, reasoning and model votes are retained. Choosing private while composing a new quorum does not discard anything or make this irreversible transition.

Freeform is available on every tier. Its answer shape does not require a separate plan entitlement; source access and private visibility are checked independently.

Judge your own material

Register a folder, an Obsidian vault, or a Git repository on your own machine as a source, then name it on a quorum so the panel can read it while it works. Sources never upload: registering one sends only its name, its kind, and a digest of what you chose to include or exclude — never the path, a file listing, or file contents. Only material a reviewer explicitly reads during a run crosses the network, and only for the length of that run.

A quorum that names a source runs at the mounted tier automatically, and stays private — see "using mounted source context always stay private" above. Mounted quorums cost 6 credits each and do not draw your daily run allowance. Reading your own material needs a plan that includes both private quorums and source-backed quorums. Mounted is not yet available on Premium.

From the CLI, the sequence is register once, connect for the length of the run, then create with --source:

sneka gilly source add ~/vaults/work --name "Work vault"
sneka gilly connect --source "Work vault"

In a second terminal, or after connect is running:

sneka gilly quorum create --mode freeform --prompt "..." --source "Work vault"
sneka gilly quorum start <id>

connect must be running for the length of the run; if it stops before the run finishes, the run stops too and the charge is credited back. See Using the Sneka CLI for the full command reference, and the gilly-sources CLI skill for the complete source-management command tree.

Run a quorum from the CLI

The operational commands live under sneka gilly:

sneka gilly quorum create --mode probability --prompt \
  "will the vendor complete security review by 15 September 2026?"
sneka gilly quorum start <id>
sneka gilly quorum watch <id>

The CLI names the types the way every other Sneka surface does: probability, selection, numeric-prediction, and freeform. See Using the Sneka CLI for the exact command reference.

start checks the draft before any panel sees it. It can answer checking, revise, refused, or unavailable without running a panel:

• checking means another request owns the check. Run start again shortly.
• revise prints a decision id and a specific suggestion. Choose an explicit

edit, then run start again, or deliberately start the unchanged draft with --acknowledge <decision-id>.

• refused means the draft cannot run as written and cannot be acknowledged.
• unavailable means Gilly could not check the draft. It stays a draft; retry

start when the service is available.

When you automate this lifecycle, inspect the JSON state. In particular, checking exits successfully even though no panel has started. The gatekeeper response contract shows every state, its exit behavior, and the refusal envelope.

For example, this keeps the same quorum id while changing the question:

sneka gilly quorum create --mode probability --prompt "will the vendor ship by September?"
sneka gilly quorum start <id>
# revise: choose an explicit replacement rather than applying advice automatically
sneka gilly quorum edit <id> --prompt "will the vendor ship by 15 September 2026?"
sneka gilly quorum start <id>
sneka gilly quorum watch <id>

To recast the answer shape, name it and provide its full replacement data, for example --mode selection --choice "Option A" --choice "Option B". An edit invalidates old check advice, so an old acknowledgement cannot authorize the changed draft. A suggested numeric recast cannot choose the unit for you; add --unit explicitly. Recasting to --mode freeform supplies nothing further: freeform declares neither options nor a unit, so the recast drops them.

A check never proposes freeform. It can suggest rewording a question, or recasting it into probability, selection, or numeric prediction — the shapes it can check a question against. Freeform is the type you choose when you do not want to declare a shape, so it stays your choice to make. Using the Sneka CLI has the exact flag reference for the installed CLI.