A design note. When a panel can read the room, you don't bolt knobs onto it — you talk to it. Cues are the teaching layer: contextual, behaviour-triggered suggestion chips that surface the right natural-language steer at the moment you'd want it, then fade as you learn. They are the second output of the floor producer, and the resolution of the room-dials question. Status: concept — designed here, not built. Written 2026-06-28.
The floor producer reads the room to stage the panel. A Cue is that same read, pointed at you — one engine, two outputs: it stages the talent, and it cues the director. There is nothing new to compute; a Cue is the producer's existing read, surfaced as a tappable phrase.
The producer already computes a rich read of each turn to stage the panel. A Cue spends that same read a second way — as a one-tap suggestion to you. No second brain.
1 · No control panel
Early designs gave the room dials because the panel couldn't read you — so you had to tell it by hand how combative, how hard, how long. But the floor producer's whole job is reading intent, and intent is dynamic: you move through deciding, venting, stress-testing, banter, and the right staging swings with it. A fixed knob set once is wrong on most turns — "constant" and "read the room" contradict each other.
So the dials split by what they actually encode:
Old dial
What it encodes
Where it goes
Character intensity keeps its dial
aesthetic taste — how vividly the personas play themselves. Invisible in the conversation; nothing you'd say mid-stream reveals it.
stays a creation-time picker, set with the cast in the new-chat modal
Debate · Challenge FP + Cues
your intent this turn — how much the panel should spar, how hard it should push you. Dynamic, and legible from the conversation.
the FP reads them per turn; you steer in plain language, and a Cue teaches you that you can
The channel already exists. The producer's prompt says asks win — an explicit "shorter / go deeper / don't comfort me" overrides anything it would infer. So grill me on this already routes straight into the staging. A composer dial would be a redundant, lower-resolution copy of a channel that's already there (and a sentence — "push me on the financials, not the team" — out-resolves any three-way chip). Cues don't add a control; they teach the control you already have.
why not a fixed controlWe're building a chat app, not a flight cockpit. A knob is a workaround for a room that can't read you — and this one can. So the conversation is the interface; Cues are the onboarding for it, not a parallel panel of switches.
2 · What a Cue is
A small, ephemeral suggestion that appears near the composer and, when tapped, writes the words for you. Three properties define it:
Contextual. It reads the last reply and offers the steer that fits it — they all agreed → offer friction or depth; it ran hot → offer relief; it left things open → offer a push.
Self-teaching. Tapping doesn't flip a hidden setting — it drops a plain-language phrase into your composer, which you can edit before sending. You learn the vocabulary by watching it appear.
Self-retiring. A fluent user simply stops producing the moments that trigger a Cue (they just type the steer). The fade isn't a timer; the chips go quiet on their own.
Roger Federer
Settle the toss first — a consistent ball position fixes most of this.
Rafael Nadal
Agreed. Get the toss right and the rest follows.
have them push back on each othergo deeper on this
Message the panel…↑
A specimen: the panel converged, so the Cue offers the dissent you might be wishing for. Tapping "have them push back" drops those words into the box — you send them like any message.
3 · The read-my-mind moment
The magic has a precise definition: a Cue should appear the moment a want has formed in your head but not yet reached your fingers. That makes timing the hard part — and the rule is counter-intuitive:
A Cue is triggered by a tell, never by the turn. The default is silence. It fires only when there's a real signal that a desire just formed — and the bar is high, because a wrong read feels presumptuous while no Cue feels fine. Precision over recall: better to miss nine than misfire once.
The tells — observable moments where a want forms:
The tell (observable)
What you're feeling
The cue
they all agreed on a contested point, and you scroll back up
"that was a pile-on — I wanted friction"
have them actually take sides
a quick question got a six-sentence essay
"tl;dr"
want the short version?
you start typing, then delete it
"I have a reaction but can't phrase it"
not quite what you meant?
you pushed back twice, tersely
"I'm not satisfied — come at me"
want them to push you instead?
long dwell on one reply, no typing
"I'm stuck / unconvinced"
press them on [that claim]
4 · The split that makes it telepathic
The content and the timing come from different places — and that division of labour is exactly what produces the read-my-mind feeling.
The producer loads the right words (it knows the gap between what the turn wanted and what it staged); the client waits for the moment your hesitation reveals you want them. You pause, unsure how to phrase it — and the exact phrase is already sitting there.
And the content is specific to this turn, never a generic menu — "press them on whether the toss really fixes nerves," not "go deeper." Specificity is what makes it feel seen.
5 · Ship it shy
the one failure modeA misfire is the only real way this breaks — a wrong read is creepy; no Cue is neutral; a right one is magic. So when in doubt, show nothing. The cost of silence is a missed teaching moment; the cost of a wrong read is breaking the spell — and the spell is the whole feature.
the teaching arc rides freeBecause Cues fire only on high-confidence moments, the first one a new user ever sees is a hit, not noise — which is how they learn "this thing gets me," and start reaching for the words themselves. There's no separate tutorial and no graduation timer: the better the aim, the faster the chips make themselves unnecessary.
6 · The first cut
Buildable as a thin layer on top of the producer — no new model, no new control surface:
The producer emits a candidate steer alongside its staging — the gap it detected, phrased as a one-line ask (it already computes the read; this is one more field, admin-debuggable like the other readouts).
The client watches a small set of tells and surfaces that steer at the moment one fires — starting with the three that are both easy to detect and unmistakably magical: type-then-delete, all-agreed-on-a-contested-point, and essay-for-a-one-line-question.
Tapping inserts the phrase into the composer (never auto-sends) — you stay in control, and you learn the words.
where it livesCues are a front-end behaviour (the tells, the chip, the insert) fed by one extra field from the floor-producer call. They touch no persisted state and carry no injection surface — a tap just writes text you could have typed. The same "ship it shy" discipline is the only tuning knob that matters.
Cues design note · 2026-06-28 · the user-facing surface of the floor producer and the resolution of the room-dials question — character intensity stays a creation-time dial; debate & challenge become the producer reading intent, with Cues teaching you to steer in plain language. Status: concept — designed, not built.