Review documents in chat

Council can pull relevant content from your documents into chat conversations using RAG (retrieval-augmented generation). This lets you ask experts to review, critique, or build on your existing work.

For panel chat

Step 1: Place documents in the panel’s docs folder

~/Council/panels/strategy-review/docs/
  ├── market-analysis.md
  ├── product-brief.txt
  └── competitive-landscape.html

Or link an external folder:

council panel docs link strategy-review --path ./research/

Step 2: Start panel chat

Council indexes new and changed documents automatically:

council chat strategy-review

ℹ Indexed 3 panel document(s) (0 unchanged, 0 failed).
📋 Starting group chat with strategy-review (3 experts)...

Step 3: Ask for review or synthesis

Reference your documents naturally — Council retrieves relevant snippets automatically:

You> Review the product brief and tell me what's weak.

[Sarah Chen — VP Strategy]
The brief covers the target market well, but I see three gaps. First,
the competitive positioning section on page 2 doesn't address the pricing
pressure from FreshDesk's new tier...

Ask for rewrites:

You> Rewrite the executive summary to be more compelling for our board.

[Sarah Chen — VP Strategy]
Here's a revised executive summary:

"In Q3, our platform processed 2.4M transactions — a 47% increase that
outpaced the market by 3x. This growth validates our bet on..."

Note

Experts produce rewritten text in the chat response. They cannot write files back to disk. Copy the output manually or use council export to capture the full conversation.

Step 4: Synthesize across documents

Ask questions that require connecting insights across multiple documents:

You> Based on the market analysis and the product brief, what's missing
from our go-to-market plan?

[Marcus Cole — Devil's Advocate]
The market analysis identifies three underserved segments, but the product
brief only targets one of them. The go-to-market plan doesn't explain why
we're leaving the other two on the table...

For 1:1 expert chat

Document retrieval is available for persona experts created with council expert create --persona and trained with council expert train. Generic experts ignore expert documents.

Place files in the persona expert’s docs folder:

~/Council/experts/cfo/docs/
  ├── q3-financials.md
  └── budget-proposal.txt

Then chat normally:

council chat cfo

Supported formats

Default: .md, .txt, .html, .pdf, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .xls, .csv, .tsv, .rtf, .odt, .ods, .odp.

Run council docs formats for the full list.

Document updates

When you update a document in the docs folder, Council re-indexes automatically the next time you start a chat:

ℹ Indexed 1 panel document(s) (2 unchanged, 0 failed).

Council detects changed files by checksum — only modified documents are reprocessed. You don’t need --new to pick up document changes; use --new only when you want to archive the current conversation and start fresh.

Tip

If you have multiple versions of the same document in the docs folder, consider removing outdated versions to keep retrieval focused on the latest content.

Related

• Chat with a panel — for multi-expert conversations
• Chat with a single expert — for 1:1 conversations