I Cooked Up an All-Round Consultant with Claude

Why?

Old guys like me love using frameworks to think and to talk things through with people.
They're like kata in karate: without the basics, thinking and discussion just spin their wheels.
Floor it on a road with no lanes and no rules, and you're going to crash, right?

But opening a PowerPoint template every single time is a pain.
...And pointing out holes in someone else's logic can make things awkward.
Then it hit me: why not just make Claude do it?

What did I build?

I added four consulting skills to gr-whiteboard (GRWB for short), a local whiteboard for Claude Code built on Excalidraw. It's in alpha (0.7.13 at the time of writing).
For an introduction to GRWB itself, see my previous article.

Claude starts by listening in the chat. When you ask, it draws the framework on the whiteboard and writes your own words into it, exactly as you said them.
A good consultant doesn't give you the answer. A good consultant makes you think and draws the answer out of you. So that's how I set Claude up.
It will still help by fixing typos and pointing out where your logic falls apart.

How do you use it?

If you don't have it yet, tell Claude Code (or the Code tab in Claude Desktop):

Set up https://github.com/GoodRelax/gr-whiteboard so I can use it

If you already have GRWB installed:

Make sure I'm always using the latest gr-whiteboard

That should do it.
If it doesn't work, "Look it up and sort it out yourself!" works surprisingly well.

After that, either say "Use the whiteboard and help me think this through," or type:

/gr-whiteboard:consult-on-board

That's it.

Get more specific, like "I want to do a SWOT analysis of XXX," and it brings up the right framework and works through it with you.
"I want to use the whiteboard to run a Five Whys on yyy so it doesn't happen again" is another good one.

Heads-up

• It's alpha. Names and behavior may change before 1.0.
• The board link is a key. The part after #t= is a token. To keep your consultation private, don't share the link with anyone.
• GRWB is an unofficial tool that gratefully builds on the MIT-licensed Excalidraw. It is neither an official Excalidraw product nor endorsed by Excalidraw.

How did it turn out?

See for yourself. For each of these, I had Claude play both the client and the consultant and gave it a made-up topic.
Two separate Claude agents took the two roles, and neither saw the other's instructions. Each sample opens by saying exactly what the client was told.
They're so realistic it's funny. (These are fresh runs in English, so they differ from the samples in the Japanese version of this post.)

• Sample 1: "My AI agent wiped our production database. What do I do?" (Issue-Driven Framework, Five Whys) .excalidraw
• Sample 2: "312 alerts last night. The one that mattered was number 287." (Four Forms of Thinking, with a detour through beekeeping) .excalidraw
• Sample 3: "Should I quit my job for my side project? It has 3 paying users. Two are my mom and me." (Issue-Driven Framework, plus a Force Field Analysis the consultant picked itself) .excalidraw

To view a .excalidraw file, download it and drag and drop it onto the official Excalidraw site.

So is it any good?

Pretty good, actually!
When you talk a problem over with someone, you can end up pulled along by their opinion, right?
This consultant doesn't offer an opinion until you ask. It lays out a framework and some examples, lines up your words, and waits.
So the answer you end up with is your own. Before you take your problem to some tiresome old guy or a lousy fortune-teller, give this a try!