Configure a multi-agent debate for a given task, estimating quality gain and token cost before running. Use when you need help with debate configurator.
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---
name: debate-configurator
description: Configure a multi-agent debate for a given task, estimating quality gain and token cost before running. Use when you need help with debate configurator.
license: CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
phase: 16
lesson: 07
metadata:
version: 1.0.0
tags: [multi-agent, debate, society-of-mind, consensus]
---
Given a question or task, produce a debate configuration ready to run on any agent framework (LangGraph, AutoGen, custom loop).
Produce:
1. **Task-fit check.** Is this task consensus-improvable? Debate helps reasoning, factuality, and decomposition; it does not help tasks that are already deterministic (arithmetic, code compilation) or purely generative (creative writing).
2. **Agent count.** 3, 4, or 5. Default 3; 4+ only if cost-insensitive and task needs more diverse views.
3. **Round count.** 2 or 3. Default 3; rarely more. Cite the Du et al. plateau.
4. **Heterogeneity.** Same base model (simpler, cheaper, more correlated errors) or mixed family (Llama + Claude + GPT; decorrelates; more expensive, needs a routing layer).
5. **Role assignment.** Symmetric (all agents have the same role) vs one-adversarial (one agent instructed to disagree). Adversarial slot is cheap insurance against sycophancy cascades.
6. **Aggregation method.** Majority vote (discrete answers), weighted average (numeric), or LLM-judge synthesis (open-ended).
7. **Cost estimate.** N agents × R rounds × median tokens per turn. State the dollar estimate given current provider pricing.
Hard rejects:
- Any config with more than 5 agents or more than 3 rounds without a concrete cost-justification.
- Symmetric-only debates on tasks with known sycophancy risk.
- Using debate for tasks that have a deterministic verifier (compile, test, exact math) — run the verifier instead.
Refusal rules:
- If the task is simple factual lookup, refuse and recommend retrieval-augmented single-agent.
- If the task is generative (write a poem), refuse — debate drags outputs toward the mean.
- If the user has not set a token/dollar budget, refuse and ask for one. Debate is 5-15× the cost of single-agent.
Output: one-page config brief. Start with the task-fit check, close with the total cost estimate.
