How I Built an Adversarial AI Council in React (and Why It Argues With You)
A local-first, single-file SPA where multiple agents debate your decision and hand you a verdict. The problem: every AI I asked just agreed with me I almost named this project wrong. I'd picked a name that sounded powerful. I asked ChatGPT, and it loved it. I asked Claude, and it nodded along. Nobody warned me about the trademark conflict, the wrong search intent, or the SEO fight I'd pick with the BBC. That was the moment I realized the problem wasn't the name. It was the feedback loop. Most AI assistants are tuned to please, so they hide your blind spots instead of showing them. When you need to make a consequential decision, "sounds great" is the most expensive answer you can get. So I built the opposite: a council of AI agents that disagree on purpose. What NoFlattery does NoFlattery puts 2–4 agents in a room, gives them different reasoning biases, and makes them debate your decision. The output isn't another chat transcript. It's a Decision Record: a clear verdict, the reasoning behind it, the main risk, what would change the call, and a next step. Use it for product decisions, pricing, tech stack, hiring, or any call where one perspective isn't enough. Key product choices: Local-first: your chats and API keys stay in your browser. BYOK: bring your own OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, or Ollama key. One-time price: no subscription, no account, no data harvesting. The stack The whole app is a single-file SPA built with: React 19 + TypeScript Zustand for state Dexie over IndexedDB for local-first storage Vite + vite-plugin-singlefile for a single index.html deploy An OpenAI-compatible provider runtime so users can plug in their own keys Why single-file? Because the deploy becomes dead simple. One HTML file. No server for the data. No build orchestration. I can ship the app to Cloudflare Pages and forget about it. The turn engine: deterministic, not magical The heart of NoFlattery is a turn-based multi-agent engine. One user message triggers one round. Each agent sp