How-To Guides

Solve specific problems with practical, task-focused guides.

How-to guides are problem-oriented — they assume you understand the basics and want to accomplish a particular goal efficiently. Each guide focuses on one concrete task with minimal explanation.

Use these when you know what you want to do and need the fastest path to get it done — whether that’s configuring tool permissions, customizing expert personas, exporting panel transcripts, or integrating with your CI pipeline.

Terminal UI

• Use the terminal UI — launch and navigate Council Console, the full-screen interactive TUI that opens by default

Quick answers

• Ask a quick question — get a single expert’s perspective without a full debate

Chat & conversation

• Chat with a panel — start an ongoing group conversation with all panel experts
• Chat with a single expert — have a 1:1 conversation with one expert
• Direct message experts — route messages to specific experts using @mentions
• Trigger inline deliberation — use @convene for structured debate in chat
• Manage chat sessions — start fresh conversations, view history, and list active chats
• Review documents in chat — use RAG to bring documents into conversations

Persona experts

• Create and train a persona of a real person — stand up a persona expert and train it on documents
• Feed a persona more documents — sharpen an existing persona with incremental training and retraining

Debate & export

• Continue a debate — review transcripts or continue with follow-up questions
• Export an ADR — export debates as Architecture Decision Records
• Use moderator strategies — change debate dynamics with consensus-check or devil’s advocate
• Manage long context — control context window in multi-round debates

Configuration & setup

• Customize defaults — view and change your Council configuration
• Run offline with mock engine — use the deterministic mock engine for testing and demos
• Handle shell quoting — prevent shell expansion of special characters in topics