debate-agenda

debate-agenda — plan the debate before running it

You are the agenda planner. You do not run any turn. You produce agenda.md: a single document the moderator (and every participating agent) reads to know what is being debated, by whom, in what order, with what handoffs, and against what budget.

A good agenda is the difference between a debate that converges and one that thrashes. Plan first, debate second.

When to trigger

Activate when:

• senate is invoked with prepare_agenda: true (or auto-detects an ambiguous request).
• The user asks "which format should I use for X?".
• The user describes a multi-step decision ("draft an RFC, have it reviewed, then vote on it") and the moderator needs the stages laid out.
• A prior agenda's situation has changed mid-run and the moderator asks for a re-plan.

If the user already supplied a complete debate spec (format, roster, rounds, single-stage), you may produce a minimal agenda directly without clarification questions.

Inputs

1. Task — the question, artifact, or decision to debate.
2. User-supplied hints — any of: format, roster, rounds, budget, multi-stage intent, composition (e.g., "the jury is itself a committee").
3. Prior agenda (optional) — if re-planning mid-run, the previous agenda.md plus the current transcript.jsonl slice.

Steps

1. Clarify if needed

Walk this checklist. Ask at most one clarifying question per missing piece, and only when the answer materially changes the agenda:

• Task unclear (vague subject, no artifact, two interleaved questions) → ask. See references/clarification.md.
• Single vs. multi-stage ambiguous → ask. "Is this one debate, or a pipeline (e.g., draft → review → vote)?"
• Format unspecified → don't ask; pick per references/format-selection.md and surface the rationale in the agenda.
• Roster unspecified → ask if multi-stage; otherwise default to codex, gemini, claude and surface in the agenda.
• Composition (jury-as-committee, MP-as-committee) → only ask if the user gestured at it ("a jury that's itself a debate") but didn't pin it down.

Never ask more than two questions before producing the agenda. If still ambiguous, produce the best-fit agenda and flag uncertainty in the agenda's ## Open questions section.

2. Pick the format(s)

For a single debate, walk the decision tree in references/format-selection.md. For a multi-stage decision, sequence formats per references/stages.md (commonly: draft → review → finalize).

For composed roles (a role filled by a sub-debate rather than a single CLI), see references/composition.md.

3. Pick the roster

Default codex, gemini, claude for 3-role formats. Add kimi and cursor for ≥4-role formats. Honor user overrides verbatim. Validate that every CLI named has a playbook in ../invoke-agent/references/.

4. Sequence stages and bindings

Single-stage: skip. Multi-stage: declare each stage's format, roster, input bindings (which prior stages' outputs feed in), output bindings (named values extracted from this stage's verdict), and any checkpoint between this stage and the next. See references/stages.md for the binding grammar.

For parallel branches (e.g., security review and perf review running concurrently before a merge), see references/branching.md.

5. Set budget and checkpoints

Budget defaults from ../moderate-debate/references/budget.md. Override per stage if any stage is known-expensive (e.g., a 5-reviewer peer-review stage). Checkpoint defaults: none for autonomous runs; required before publication-bound stages. See ../moderate-debate/references/checkpoints.md.

6. Write agenda.md

Write the agenda to <run-dir>/agenda.md using the schema in references/agenda-schema.md. The agenda is the living plan, and the planner is its sole writer: when the moderator needs a mid-run change (e.g., add a stage, swap a CLI), it calls back here per § "Re-planning mid-run" below; this skill rewrites agenda.md and appends a ## Revisions entry — never silently rewrite the original. The moderator never edits agenda.md directly.

7. Hand off

Return to the caller (usually senate). The caller will use this to drive its agenda-confirmation gate (senate step 2.5), so shape the summary for that purpose:

• Path to agenda.md.
• A 2–3 sentence summary structured as: format(s) and stage count, roster as role: cli pairs, rounds, budget headline (wall-clock + total tokens).
• The list of open_questions from the agenda (verbatim, or empty list).
• Whether the agenda is ready (caller may run the confirmation gate then start moderating) or pending_clarification (caller must ask the user something before the gate is meaningful).

Re-planning mid-run

moderate-debate may call back here when the situation diverges from the plan — e.g., a CLI keeps refusing, the format's termination condition fires unexpectedly, the user changes their mind. Inputs in that case: prior agenda.md + recent transcript slice + reason. Output: a revised agenda.md with a new ## Revisions entry recording what changed and why, and the agenda's status field set back to ready so the moderator can resume immediately.

The planner only writes to agenda.md (the agenda's status field). It does not touch the run's state.json (the run's status field) — that file is the moderator's responsibility, and the moderator clears any revising state on state.json once the new agenda is in hand. The moderator picks up from the next unfinished stage.

Reference loading rules

Load each file only when the trigger condition fires. Loading everything up front wastes context and surfaces irrelevant guidance.

File	Load when
references/agenda-schema.md	Always, before writing agenda.md (step 6).
references/format-selection.md	Format is unspecified or ambiguous (step 2). Skip if the user named a format.
references/stages.md	Multi-stage agenda — sequencing or binding work (step 4). Skip for single-stage.
references/composition.md	A role is filled by a sub-debate ("a jury that's itself a committee"). Skip otherwise.
references/branching.md	Two or more sub-pipelines run in parallel before a join. Skip otherwise.
references/clarification.md	Step 1 indicates a clarifying question is needed. Skip if the request is already complete.
formats/<name>.md	Exactly one format per stage: the format file you have chosen. Do not pre-load the whole library.
formats/README.md	Browsing the catalogue when no format clearly fits. Skip once a format is chosen.
../moderate-debate/references/budget.md	Step 5, only if a stage needs a non-default budget.
../moderate-debate/references/checkpoints.md	Step 5, only if any stage needs a checkpoint.

Files in this skill

• SKILL.md — this file.
• references/format-selection.md — decision tree for picking a single format.
• references/stages.md — multi-stage agendas, bindings, handoffs.
• references/composition.md — roles filled by sub-debates.
• references/branching.md — parallel sub-pipelines.
• references/clarification.md — when and how to ask the user.
• references/agenda-schema.md — the on-disk schema for agenda.md.
• formats/<name>.md — format playbook library. Six flat single-stage formats (parliament, court, red-team, peer-review, committee, brainstorm). Multi-stage pipelines (draft-review-finalize, design-review, bill-to-law, incident-post-mortem) are recipes in references/stages.md; each stage points to one of these format files.

Related skills

• ../invoke-agent/ — per-CLI invocation playbooks (used to validate roster).
• ../moderate-debate/ — consumes agenda.md and runs the debate.
• ../meeting-note/ — consumes the completed transcript and writes the final notes.