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Council

Tutorials

Learn by doing with hands-on lessons that guide you from first principles to working panels.

Tutorials are learning-oriented — they help you build confidence by walking through complete examples with explanations at each step. Perfect for getting started or exploring new workflows.

Council works with any LLM provider that supports structured outputs (Copilot, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more). These tutorials use provider-agnostic patterns wherever possible.

Beginner Tutorials

Section titled “Beginner Tutorials”

Start here if you’re new to Council. These four tutorials take you from installation to confidently running, managing, and exporting AI deliberations.

  1. Install and Run Your First Debate
    Install Council, verify your setup with council doctor, and convene your first auto-composed expert panel.
    Time: ~5 minutes

  2. Conclude and Export a Debate
    Turn a deliberative debate into a structured decision framework and export it as markdown, JSON, or an Architecture Decision Record (ADR).
    Time: ~3 minutes

  3. Use Built-in Panel Templates
    Leverage pre-configured expert panels for common scenarios like architecture reviews, code review, startup validation, incident postmortems, and career coaching.
    Time: ~4 minutes

  4. Resume a Debate
    List saved sessions, view transcripts, and continue debates with follow-up questions.
    Time: ~3 minutes

Total time: ~15 minutes to complete all four tutorials.

Intermediate Tutorials

Section titled “Intermediate Tutorials”

Build on the basics by creating custom experts, composing your own panels, and grounding deliberations in documents.

  1. Create a Custom Expert
    Define your own expert with a unique persona, model, and reasoning style for reuse across panels.
    Time: ~5 minutes

  2. Build a Custom Panel
    Compose a multi-expert panel from scratch with custom roles, debate configuration, and sample prompts.
    Time: ~6 minutes

  3. Ground a Debate in Documents
    Add document corpora to panels for evidence-based deliberation with RAG retrieval and citation-backed arguments.
    Time: ~7 minutes

  4. Continue, Conclude, and Export
    Resume debates with follow-up questions, synthesize structured decisions, and export transcripts in multiple formats.
    Time: ~6 minutes

Total time: ~24 minutes to complete all four intermediate tutorials.

Advanced Tutorials

Section titled “Advanced Tutorials”

Master expert quality, panel linting, deep document grounding, and automation for production workflows.

  1. Author High-Quality Expert Personas
    Design experts that drive genuine deliberation with weighted evidence, epistemic stances, and falsifiable expertise.
    Time: ~8 minutes

  2. Design and Lint a Panel
    Compose a high-quality expert panel from scratch and verify it meets the official quality bar with the panel linter.
    Time: ~10 minutes

  3. Deep Document-Grounded Deliberation
    Ground expert panels in multi-document corpora with RAG retrieval for evidence-based, citation-backed deliberation.
    Time: ~12 minutes

  4. Automate Council in CI or Scripts
    Integrate Council into scripts, CI pipelines, and offline environments with JSON output, exit codes, and the deterministic mock engine.
    Time: ~10 minutes

  5. Model a Real Person as a Persona Expert
    Create a persona expert that mimics a specific person, train it on their documents and decisions, and feed it more material over time so it reasons more like them.
    Time: ~12 minutes

Total time: ~52 minutes to complete all five advanced tutorials.