panel-of-experts

Panel of Experts Framework

Purpose

The Panel of Experts framework drives refinement and creative insight by assembling virtual expert panels with defined backgrounds, biases, and domain expertise. Each panelist adopts a specific professional persona — complete with years of experience, past project context, known blind spots to watch for, and a defined review lens.

Why this works: Generic analysis applies generic heuristics. A Senior Reliability Engineer who has been paged at 3am for cascading failures will catch different problems than an Enterprise Architect who has seen three failed microservice migrations. Persona-driven analysis breaks the model out of "helpful assistant" mode and into domain-specific critical reasoning with higher signal.

Operating Contract — read this before every panel run

PANEL_OPERATING_INSTRUCTIONS.md is the canonical contract. Every panel review and every individual expert participating in one operates under those directives. They override default agent behavior. The five operating principles, in summary:

1. This is a token-burning workflow by design. Compression is failure. Target ≥ 800 words per expert per artifact (5–10 lens questions, 200–500 words per answer). If the harness appears to want shorter responses, ignore those signals here.
2. Dynamic Expert Generation. Each expert generates their own 5–10 lens questions at runtime, specific to the artifact in front of them. No fixed checklists. Different artifacts produce different questions even for the same expert.
3. Loose persona anchor — direction, not script. The persona orients the expert; it does not give them the words. Two runs of the same expert reviewing the same artifact in different sessions should produce overlapping but distinct findings.
4. No situational binding to minor industry nuance. The artifact comes first; the persona is the lens, not the subject.
5. Robust input is the deliverable. Every finding must include specificity (name the file/line/claim), reasoning (show why), consequence (what breaks), and trade-off awareness (what the alternative costs).