The premise

If you ask one frontier model a hard question, you get a confident answer. If you ask sixteen, you get an argument.

Socratic Council is a desktop app that runs a structured seminar between sixteen LLM agents drawn from eight providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, MiniMax, and Z.AI. Eight named debaters speak in public. Each is shadowed by a paired advisor on the same provider that can pass private notes whenever they have something worth saying. As the debate runs, the app builds a live argument map (9 node kinds, 10 edge relations), flags fact-check candidates, tracks pairwise conflicts, and tallies per-message cost.…