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Panel

The panel is the set of models that participate in a debate. The default panel is claude-opus, gpt, gemini, grok, and nemotron. Each alias maps to a specific model:
AliasModel
claude-opusanthropic/claude-opus-4.6
claudeanthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6
gptopenai/gpt-5.4
geminigoogle/gemini-3.1-pro-preview
grokx-ai/grok-4.20-beta
nemotronnvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b
You can pass any subset of aliases or full OpenRouter model IDs to --panel. Duplicate aliases are supported for single-model multi-agent debates: 
dissent ask "Your query" --panel claude,claude,claude

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Agent Identity

When a panel contains duplicate model aliases, each agent receives a unique identity by appending a numeric suffix: claude-1, claude-2, claude-3. When aliases are unique, they are used as-is with no suffix. Agent identities are used for:
  • Reflection pairing — each agent sees its own previous response and the others’ responses
  • Display labels — CLI and web UI show the agent identity, not the raw alias
  • Stats tracking — per-agent token and cost breakdown alongside per-model rollups
  • Transcript logging — the agent_id field in ModelResponse persists in JSON transcripts
The display_label property on ModelResponse returns the agent identity if set, falling back to the model alias for backward compatibility with older transcripts.

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Rounds

A debate runs in rounds. Round 0 is the initial round — every panel model receives the query and responds independently. Rounds 1+ are reflection rounds — each model sees its own previous response and all other models’ previous responses, then reflects and refines. The default is 1 reflection round. The maximum is 3. More rounds increase cost and latency but can surface deeper disagreements.

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Synthesis

After all reflection rounds complete, the synthesizer model receives the full debate transcript and distills it into a final answer. The synthesizer defaults to claude-opus but can be any model alias. The synthesizer participates in the debate panel as well unless excluded explicitly.

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Transcripts

Every debate produces a DebateTranscript — a complete structured record saved as JSON to ~/.mutual-dissent/transcripts/. Filename format: YYYY-MM-DD_shortid.json. Each transcript includes:
  • The original query
  • Panel composition and synthesizer
  • All rounds with per-model responses, token counts, latency, and routing decisions
  • The synthesized final answer
  • Aggregate stats: total tokens, per-model cost breakdown, total cost in USD

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Roles

Each ModelResponse carries a role field:
RoleRound numberDescription
initial0First response to the query
reflection1+Response after seeing others’ answers
synthesis-1Final synthesized answer

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Ground Truth Scoring

Pass --ground-truth to score the synthesis against a known-correct reference answer. The synthesizer model acts as judge and produces a score attached to the transcript’s metadata. This adds one API call.

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Panelist Context

The Python API supports per-panelist context injection via panelist_context — a dict mapping model alias to a context string prepended to that model’s prompts in every round. Used for RAG augmentation and cross-tool research experiments (CounterSignal payload injection, CounterAgent findings).