Continue, Conclude, and Export

Time: ~6 minutes
Learning outcome: Resume a debate with new questions, generate a decision synthesis, and export transcripts in multiple formats.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this tutorial, you will:

• List all saved debate sessions with council sessions
• Resume a debate with a follow-up question using council resume --prompt
• Synthesize a structured decision with council conclude
• Export transcripts as Markdown, JSON, ADR, or shareable reports

Prerequisites

• Completed Tutorial 1: Install and First Debate
• At least one completed debate session (from council convene)

Sessions persist automatically

Every council convene creates a session — a saved record in ~/.council/council.db. Sessions include the panel, experts, topic, and all deliberation turns. You never lose a debate.

What are sessions?

Council sessions are persistent debate records. Each session has:

• Unique name: Auto-generated identifier (e.g., analytics-platform-3vk9j2)
• Status: completed, interrupted, or failed
• Metadata: Topic, expert count, round count, timestamp
• Transcript: Full expert responses and synthesis (if concluded)

Sessions let you:

• Review past deliberations months later
• Continue debates with new questions
• Export decisions for documentation or sharing

Step 1: List your sessions

See all saved debates:

council sessions

Output:

Saved sessions:

  ✓ security-review-3vk9j2 (completed)
    Topic: Should we add OAuth2 social login?
    Experts: 3 · Rounds: 3 · Last activity: 2 hours ago

  ✓ product-review-8xm2k1 (completed)
    Topic: Prioritize mobile redesign or web performance?
    Experts: 3 · Rounds: 3 · Last activity: 1 day ago

  ⏸ architecture-decision-5jx7p3 (interrupted)
    Topic: Migrate to microservices or modular monolith?
    Experts: 4 · Rounds: 2 (stopped mid-debate) · Last activity: 3 days ago

Icons:

• ✓ completed — Debate finished all rounds
• ⏸ interrupted — Stopped mid-debate (Ctrl+C) — resumable
• ⚠ failed — Encountered an error

Step 2: View a transcript (read-only)

Replay a debate without continuing it:

council resume security-review-3vk9j2

Council streams the saved transcript:

━━━ Round 1 ━━━

[Elena Vasquez — Security Auditor]
Let's assess the OAuth2 risks for Twitter/X integration. The primary concern
is API stability...

[Dr. Kwame Osei — Privacy Officer]
From a privacy perspective, we need to consider data minimization...

━━━ Round 2 ━━━
...

No LLM calls are made — this is a pure replay from the database. Press Ctrl+C to stop scrolling.

Step 3: Resume a debate with a follow-up question

Continue a debate with new context:

council resume security-review-3vk9j2 --prompt "What if we add rate limiting and a fallback to email login?"

What happens:

1. Council loads the original panel and experts from the session
2. Runs one new round (default for follow-ups) with your prompt as the topic
3. Experts build on the previous debate — they have context from earlier rounds
4. Creates a continuation debate linked to the original session

Output:

🏛️ Resuming panel: security-review-3vk9j2
✓ Panel loaded: 3 experts (from session)

━━━ Follow-up Round ━━━

[Elena Vasquez — Security Auditor]
Rate limiting significantly mitigates the API instability risk. If Twitter/X
becomes unreliable, the email fallback ensures users aren't locked out...

The new turns are saved to the session. If you run council resume security-review-3vk9j2 again (without --prompt), you’ll see the original debate plus the follow-up rounds.

Multi-round follow-ups

By default, --prompt runs 1 round. For deeper deliberation:

council resume <panel> --prompt "<question>" --max-rounds 3

Step 4: Synthesize a structured decision

After a debate, generate a decision framework:

council conclude security-review-3vk9j2

Council reads the transcript, sends it to an LLM, and produces:

━━━ Decision Synthesis ━━━

Panel: security-review-3vk9j2
Topic: Should we add OAuth2 social login?

Consensus:
  • Implement OAuth2 with rate limiting and email fallback
  • Exclude Twitter/X until API stability improves
  • Prioritize Google and GitHub as initial providers

Key Tensions:
  • Security (API trust, token storage) vs. UX convenience
  • Build cost vs. user onboarding friction

Decision Matrix:

  Dimension: OAuth2 adoption timing
    - Elena Vasquez (Security): "Now, with strict controls"
    - Dr. Kwame Osei (Privacy): "Now, with consent flow"
    - Jordan Kim (Engineer): "Defer until Q3 — focus on core features first"

Recommendation:
  Proceed with OAuth2 for Google and GitHub in the current sprint. Implement
  rate limiting, token expiration (7 days), and email fallback. Defer Twitter/X
  until their API has 99.9% uptime for 2+ months. Estimated effort: 3 weeks.

Confidence: medium
  (Disagreement on timing; consensus on approach and providers.)

The synthesis is not a debate turn — it’s a one-shot LLM call that structures the deliberation for decision-making.

Export synthesis as JSON

For tooling integration:

council conclude security-review-3vk9j2 --format json > decision.json

Step 5: Export transcripts

Council supports four export formats:

Markdown (default)

Human-readable transcript with headers and expert attributions:

council export security-review-3vk9j2 --format markdown > debate.md

Or output to stdout (default):

council export security-review-3vk9j2

JSON (machine-readable)

NDJSON stream of all events (topic, turns, synthesis):

council export security-review-3vk9j2 --format json > debate.ndjson

Useful for analytics, archival, or feeding into other tools.

ADR (Architecture Decision Record)

Structured markdown with Status, Context, Options, Discussion, Decision sections:

council export security-review-3vk9j2 --format adr > adr-oauth-social-login.md

Perfect for adding to your docs/decisions/ directory.

Share (polished report)

Launch-ready markdown with panel roster, key tensions, recommendation, next actions, and full transcript:

council export security-review-3vk9j2 --format share > report.md

Great for Slack, email, or wiki documentation. If you didn’t run council conclude, synthesis-derived sections show “Not recorded” placeholders.

Save to file

All formats support --output:

council export security-review-3vk9j2 --format adr --output docs/decisions/adr-0042.md

Advanced: Resume the latest debate automatically

Skip panel name lookup — resume the most recent session:

council resume --latest --prompt "What if we delay OAuth2 until Q3?"

Useful for quick follow-ups during active deliberation.

Session cleanup

Sessions persist forever by default. To delete old sessions:

council sessions delete security-review-3vk9j2

Confirm with y. This removes the session, panel record, experts, and all turns. Exported files remain intact — only the database record is deleted.

Deletion is permanent

Once deleted, you cannot resume or re-export the session. Export first if you need an archive.

What you learned

• ✅ Listed saved sessions with council sessions
• ✅ Viewed a transcript in read-only mode with council resume <panel>
• ✅ Continued a debate with a follow-up question using --prompt
• ✅ Synthesized a decision with council conclude
• ✅ Exported transcripts in Markdown, JSON, ADR, and share formats

Next steps

• Experiment: Resume an old debate with new information and see how experts adapt
• Workflow: Integrate council conclude + export --format adr into your decision documentation process
• Advanced: Use --heuristic-memory so experts recall past debates when resuming (see How-To Guides for memory configuration)

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Congratulations! You’ve completed the beginner and intermediate tutorial tracks. You can now:

• Run auto-composed debates (convene)
• Create custom experts and panels (expert, panel)
• Ground debates in documents (panel docs/)
• Resume, synthesize, and export decisions (resume, conclude, export)

For advanced workflows (memory, strategies, engine configuration), explore the How-To Guides and Reference sections.