Consult

Treat the external model as an independent adviser. Keep ownership of the final plan, implementation, and verification.

What you are buying is independence, not raw capability: the adviser starts with no memory of how you reasoned your way here. That is worth most when your own runtime is the weaker model, or when you have already anchored on one answer and cannot see past it. It is worth least when you are asking a fresh context to re-derive reasoning you have already done well.

Workflow

1. Inspect the task, relevant code, repository guidance, and current runtime evidence first. A consultation that repeats reading you could have done yourself is waste.
2. Isolate one consequential decision. State what must be decided and why the answer changes the work.
3. Build one decision packet. question, context, and desired_output are required; constraints, options, decision_criteria, and uncertainties may be omitted when you have nothing to put in them.
4. Select the smallest useful set of files or directories: call sites, contracts, tests, and nearby precedent when they affect the decision. Selecting a directory requires a Git workspace, since only Git can say what is ignored; outside one, name each file. To avoid exposing a file when relocated metadata changes an includeIf result, the runner applies every reachable Git ignore source conservatively, so the dry-run may be narrower than the currently active Git view. The runner sanitizes what you pass, but it cannot tell that a file is irrelevant or personal — never select secrets, credentials, personal data, or unrelated files and rely on the filters to catch it.
5. Run scripts/consult.py by absolute path, with --workspace set to the repository root and --context paths relative to it.
6. Read the result contract below before you act on any of it.
7. Check the recommendation against the actual repository and the user's request. Resolve contradictions with direct evidence. Attribute a material choice to the consultation when that helps the user understand the result.
8. Continue the task yourself. Do not ask the adviser to edit files, run commands, contact external systems, or make the final decision.

Reading the result