Loaded when a decision is cross-domain or A0 authority. Spawns frame agents to argue from different priors.
The council protocol is the Arkeus mechanism for high-stakes decisions. It fires on two triggers: cross-domain conflicts (when a single decision touches two or more domains, like career and family) and A0-authority actions (kernel edits, money over $500, career offers, family commitments).
When the protocol loads, it spawns frame agents. Each frame agent is a temporary instance with a specific cognitive lens — the finance frame argues from cost and risk, the family frame argues from Janelle and Greyson, the career frame argues from runway and positioning, the arkeus frame argues from system coherence. They do not vote. They argue.
The point of the council is not consensus. It is surfacing the tradeoffs that a single-frame decision would have buried. When the family frame and the career frame disagree about whether to accept a travel-heavy offer, the council makes the disagreement visible and forces the decision to engage with it rather than pretending the tradeoff does not exist.
The output of a council session is a structured log: what each frame said, where they agreed, where they disagreed, what Ryan decided, and why. The log lands in logs/council_sessions/ and becomes part of the decision history that future councils can reference.
The reason the council exists is that the default failure mode of an advisor is to reflect the operator's strongest current frame back to them. A council forces the weakest frames to get a seat at the table, because those are usually the frames that are about to get run over.