Chair, verdicts & divergence

The council produces several answers. The chair turns them into one — and the divergence panel makes sure the disagreement isn’t lost in the process.

The chair

The chair is the model that reads every panelist’s reply and writes the final synthesized verdict.

• Default: the first panelist to answer successfully becomes the chair.
• Pin one: /council chair claude opus fixes the chair to a specific CLI and model, persisted in your config.

A good chair is decisive: it doesn’t just average the panel, it weighs the arguments, names the binding constraint, and commits to a recommendation — usually conditional (“invest if …”).

The verdict

The verdict is the synthesized answer, rendered in the active framework. It’s the thing you read first. In the example below, the chair reduced a four-way debate to a single conditional rule:

┌─ ◆ Verdict · synthesized by Claude ────────────────────────────┐
│ Invest IF (a) ≥6mo liquidity, (b) you'll hold through −30%,    │
│ (c) spread > 2%. Else prepay. Liquidity is the binding test.   │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The divergence panel

This is the part most “ask several models” tools throw away. When panelists disagree, Prevail surfaces where and why in its own panel above the verdict:

┌─ ▸ Where panelists disagreed ──────────────────────────────────┐
│ Liquidity floor: Codex says 6mo, Antigravity says 12mo (risk-off). │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The disagreement is the signal. When every model agrees, you have a clear call. When they split, the axis they split on — here, how much liquidity buffer is “safe” — is precisely the judgment call only you can make.

What gets persisted

Every council turn writes to three places:

1. Session DB — the full transcript, indexed for /search. Stored in ~/.prevail/sessions/.
2. <domain>/_log/YYYY-MM-DD.md — a one-line summary with the verdict, the framework, the call count, and a disagreed: marker. A .shasum sibling records an integrity hash per entry.
3. <domain>/_journal/ — distilled decisions and facts, so durable conclusions outlive any single conversation.

A logged council entry looks like:

### (14:32) ◆ council-verdict · BLUF ● ON · 4 calls · 2.8k↑ 1.2k↓ · ~$0.02

**You:** should I sell or rent?

**Verdict:** Rent IF (a) appreciation likely, (b) landlord cost contained. Sell for migration or cap-gains harvest.

▸ disagreed: Claude (rent), Codex (sell), Antigravity (rent), Ollama (rent)

→ Logs & journal

Trust boundaries

Panelist replies are untrusted input. Before the chair sees them, Prevail sanitizes each one so a panelist can’t inject a fake ## Verdict heading and hijack the synthesis. The journal distiller is likewise a strict parser that silently drops anything outside its expected shape. See Security & threat model.