update-actors

name	update-actors
description	Edit the simulation participants in a workspace — actor persona briefs (snowglobe-style templates) or council-member panel models (council-style templates). Use when the user wants to "update actors", "edit personas", "swap a model in the panel", "add an actor", or "change the council members". Sentinel-aware: dispatches based on whether the workspace template supports actor editing.

Update actors / panel members

Two very different operations live behind one user-facing concept ("the participants in the simulation"):

• Snowglobe-style templates — actors are Markdown persona briefs in a directory (e.g. geopol/actors/*.md). Editing means rewriting briefs, adding new ones, or removing ones.
• Council-style templates — there are no actor personas. The "participants" are the LLMs in the forecasting panel, configured via a CLI flag at run time. Editing means changing which models the next run uses.

Steps

1. Read sentinel. cat <workspace>/.template-id. Look up the template in templates/registry.json.
2. Branch on supports_actor_edit:
   • true — open the directory at actors_path (e.g. geopol/actors/). List existing briefs. Ask what the user wants to do: edit one, add a new persona, remove one, or bulk-restructure. For new personas, follow the field structure of existing briefs in that template (don't invent a new format). For edits, preserve frontmatter if the upstream uses it.
   • false — explain that this template has no editable actor sim. The participants are the council-member LLMs, configured at run time. Ask if the user wants to update the model panel for future runs. If yes:
     • Show the current default panel (read from the upstream template's docs or --council-members default).
     • Ask which models to swap. Common choices: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6, openai/gpt-5, google/gemini-3-flash-preview, deepseek/deepseek-v3.2, z-ai/glm-5.1, moonshotai/kimi-k2.5.
     • Persist the chosen panel in the workspace's scenario.md (or a panel.txt if simpler), so run-simulation can read it back and pass --council-members automatically.
3. Report back. What was changed, where it's persisted, and whether the change applies to future runs only or also retroactively (it's always future-only — past runs are immutable checkpoints).

Notes

• Never edit files inside an existing run's checkpoint dir (reports/<timestamp>/). Past runs are immutable history.
• For snowglobe-style edits, encourage the user to make small, evaluable changes — adding 5 actors at once makes attribution of accuracy changes harder.
• If the user really wants to change the actor list of a Council template, the right move is to switch templates by scaffolding a new Forecaster workspace, not to fight the Council shape.