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The Council: multi-lens research on demand

Some questions deserve more than one agent's take. The Council is a prescribed research org — a Head, five Leads (Empirical, Historical, Critical, Practical, Synthesist), and three researchers under each Lead — that answers a hard question from five deliberately different angles and merges the result into one synthesis.

You convene it explicitly, on a specific issue. It never runs on its own.

How to convene it

From an issue you want researched:

  • In the UI: open the issue and click Convene Council in the properties panel.
  • Via the API: POST /api/issues/{id}/convene-council.

The issue's title (and body) become the question, and the issue becomes the source — the Council's work hangs off it as child issues, so you can watch the cascade unfold from the issue you started on. If the company has no Council yet, one is installed automatically on first convene.

What happens

A deterministic orchestrator drives the whole pass — you don't manage any of it:

  1. Fan-out — it creates a per-lens issue for each of the 5 Leads and 15 researchers and dispatches the 15 researchers, each with the question.
  2. Merge to Leads — when a lens's three researchers finish, their findings are handed to that Lead, who synthesizes a single lens view.
  3. Merge to the Head — when all five Leads finish, their syntheses are handed to the Head, who writes the final cross-lens answer.
  4. Publish — the Head's synthesis is posted back to your source issue.

The whole pass is bounded to 21 runs (15 researchers + 5 Leads + 1 Head) — no re-runs, no open-ended fan-out — so the cost is known up front.

Good questions for the Council

Research, investigation, and judgment calls that genuinely benefit from multiple perspectives — "how should we price the new tier?", "survey the approaches to X", "investigate vendor Y". A single-provider lookup is usually a job for one ordinary agent; the Council's value is the triangulation across lenses and providers.

Notes

  • Explicit-only. Triage never auto-routes to the Council; an operator decides to convene it. This keeps its cost intentional.
  • One at a time per issue. Convening an issue that already has a Council running returns a conflict rather than starting a second pass.
  • Idle-free. Council members only run when the orchestrator dispatches them — they don't burn tokens on a heartbeat between convocations.