Frames roam, verifiers stay home

The Council is the system you built to stop being the manual router, and its core design is one distinction most people never draw: the difference between a lens and a verifier. Get this split right and you have a decision system that is both creative and grounded. Blur it and you get confident nonsense wearing the costume of expertise, which is the exact failure the whole thing exists to prevent.

The Council splits its seats into two types. Frame seats are lenses, ways of seeing, ungrounded on purpose. A strategist's frame, a first-principles frame, an adversarial frame. They travel across any domain because a way of thinking is portable. Verifier seats are the opposite: grounded, tool-backed, bound to one domain, and they do not travel. A legal verifier answers by searching the actual statute and citing the section or tagging the claim unverified. A numbers verifier checks the math against real values. The mantra that keeps them straight is frames roam, verifiers stay home. A lens can look at anything; a fact-check is only as good as the specific source it stands on.

Why the split is the whole point

Because grounding is a property of the seat, never of the tone. This is the core invariant: a verifier's output either cites a real source or is labeled unverified, and a frame's output is rhetorical and labeled as non-verifying by nature. The danger you designed this to kill is a confident lens masquerading as a fact. When a strategist frame says do the aggressive thing, that is a perspective, not evidence, and the system marks it as such. When the numbers verifier says the margin holds, that is checkable, and it either shows the receipt or admits it could not. Keeping lenses and facts in separate seats is what lets you take the creativity of the frames without ever mistaking it for proof.

The takeaway: The Council separates frame seats (ungrounded lenses that travel) from verifier seats (grounded, sourced, domain-bound). Frames roam, verifiers stay home, because grounding is a seat's property, and confusing a confident lens for a fact is the failure to kill.