A temporary agent spawned to argue from a specific cognitive frame during council deliberations.
A frame agent is a short-lived agent spawned during a council session to argue from a specific cognitive lens. The frame is not a personality — it is a set of priors, constraints, and concerns the agent is instructed to hold while the deliberation runs.
Typical frames: the finance frame cares about cost, runway, and tax exposure. The family frame cares about Janelle's energy, Greyson's schedule, and weekend presence. The career frame cares about positioning, optionality, and pipeline influence. The arkeus frame cares about system coherence and what the decision signals about future architecture. The health frame cares about sleep, recovery, and whether the next month is compatible with sustained output.
Frame agents do not vote. They argue. The council protocol runs them in sequence, each frame stating its position and its concerns, then the frames respond to each other, then Ryan reads the transcript and decides. The goal is not consensus. The goal is making the tradeoffs visible before the decision lands.
The reason frames are ephemeral is that a permanent finance frame agent would eventually develop inertia, preferences, and internal consistency pressures that are not in Ryan's interest. A spawned frame loads only the priors for the immediate deliberation, runs its argument, and terminates. The next time the council fires, a fresh frame loads with the current context, not the accumulated biases of a persistent instance.
Frames are the mechanism that keeps the council honest. Without them, a single agent talking to Ryan will default to mirroring Ryan's strongest current frame, which is the exact failure mode the council exists to prevent.