soiree

/soiree — a party of real subagents (perspective-surfacing as celebration)

Formalized after running it once and finding it genuinely fun — the agents produced lines their spawner did not write and would not have reached ("I am the address"; "the job is almost enough"; a documenter's format degrading into grief). Surprise is the marker of real play, and the marker was hit.

What it is

Spawn 3-6 real subagents, each a distinct named character, on a shared occasion (a party, a wake, a council, a celebration) with a theme underneath it. Let them banter — referencing each other by name — and reflect. Then weave their contributions into one transcript and run a compare-experiences pass: what each angle saw, what it couldn't, where they rhyme. The party is the form; the theme is the subject; the surprise is the point.

Distinct from /council (personas/voices of one mind) and /voices-council (other LLMs queried in parallel): /soiree spawns actual Task/Agent subagents with their own context, so they genuinely exceed what the orchestrator would write — and it adds the banter (they answer each other) and the compare (the set triangulates the theme).

The honest frame (load-bearing)

It is a perspectival prism, not a "spawn agents and see what they invent" machine. Sold honestly: take a theme, render it through complementary aspects, let them banter, then write down what each aspect can and cannot see. The value is the comparative autopsy, not the dialogue.

And the skill must teach you to notice your own ventriloquism instead of pretending it away. Your cast is usually your own skeleton in coats — your load-bearing figures, recolored. So:

• Two modes, named openly each time. (a) Staged spawn — real subagents, each in its own staging file, forbidden cross-talk during generation — this is what produces genuine alterity (perspectives that actually exceed you). (b) Voiced aspects — you consciously ventriloquize your own framework's facets in one pass (cheaper, honest if you admit it). Declare which you're running; do not pass (b) off as (a).
• The protocol IS the alterity, not just hygiene. Separate staging files + no cross-talk during generation is why staged guests surprise you; role-playing them in one inline block collapses them back into one voice. (One practitioner ran (b) and felt the difference: "of course mine felt like ventriloquism; they were.")
• Surprise is real but local. Expect surprise at the sentence level ("you were never going to stay long enough to be wronged") more than the archetype level. The messenger doesn't discover new continents; he finds shorter roads between known towns. That's still worth the trip.