THE WORD AGAINST THE FLOOD
OPEN PROTOCOL · WORKING TOOLS
The COMPANION Dossier is an open-source platform for thinking with AI personas.
Bring a question or a document. Explore it through perspectives drawn from history, literature, and your own imagination. You lead the conversation.
Start in your browser with The Harness. No installation.
01 / THE FOUNDING IDEA
The project began with a manifesto against the information flood. Its proposition was simple: a different perspective can help us ask a better question.
The COMPANION Dossier turns that idea into a practice. Give an AI a defined perspective, supply material to reason from, and make room for disagreement. The aim is to deepen your judgment.
Read the founding Dossier PDF ↗02 / FROM IDEA TO PRACTICE
You do not need to learn the whole project to begin. Start with one question and one perspective.
A decision, a passage, a lesson, an unfinished idea. A question is enough; documents are optional.
Try Socrates for questions, Ada Lovelace for systems, or several personas for a conversation across viewpoints.
Explore the responses, return to your sources, and decide what holds up. Export the conversation if you want to keep the record.
A way to question your assumptions.
YOUR STARTING PROMPTHelp me examine one assumption in a decision I’m making. Ask one question at a time.
Two lenses on how someone learns.
YOUR STARTING PROMPTHelp me rethink a lesson that isn’t connecting. Ask about the learners before suggesting changes.
A way to examine a system’s possibilities.
YOUR STARTING PROMPTHelp me examine an idea for a tool. Ask what it takes in, what rules it follows, and what it could make possible.
Select the named perspectives in The Harness (both for the lesson example), then paste the prompt into the conversation. These are examples you can use, not recorded AI answers.
The voices are AI-generated. A convincing response is an invitation to investigate. Historical fidelity is a question the project actively studies.
03 / WORKING PRODUCTS
Begin with a chamber built around your interests. Each gives the protocol a different purpose. For a bespoke experience, build your own with The Harness below.
Explore a learning problem with five educational perspectives.
Put a business question in front of several contrasting minds.
Revisit assumptions through the Wright brothers’ engineering lens.
Bring questions of public responsibility into a historical dialogue.
Reflect on professional conscience, care, and the human questions of medicine.
Think through your career, the work you want to do, and where to go next.
THE BESPOKE PLATFORM / BUILD YOUR OWN
Create a chamber around your own question. The Harness is the custom platform: choose your personas, bring your source material, and shape the conversation yourself.
04 / THE SCHOLARSHIP
That distinction sits at the center of the research. The public work asks how to evaluate a persona against the documentary record.
THE PUBLIC TALK
How Hamilton (the Musical) Poisoned Your Persona Evals.
Jacob E. Thomas · talk, transcript & chapters
Watch on AI EngineerEvaluating the Transition of Character-Based AI from Entertainment to Epistemic Infrastructure
Jacob E. Thomas · Rick Halpern · Shawn Martin
August 10, 2026 · Preprint
A framework for evaluating documentary fidelity, with a proposed experimental protocol and sealed research materials.
DOI 10.2139/ssrn.7260618The Harness assembles the protocol, chosen personas, and supplied material into a prompt. Its exports record the model, sources, and a prompt fingerprint, so the construction can be inspected.
Read the source ↗05 / YOUR FIRST SESSION
Use the browser workshop, or take the open protocol to an AI chat you already use.
Start without uploading a document. The example above gives you a first question.
Begin with The HarnessYour text goes through The COMPANION Dossier service to Anthropic. This browser saves recent sessions for resuming. Exports include your conversation and supplied documents.
Using this matter, summon [Name].Use a model that accepts files or their text. Your provider’s account, limits, and data policies apply. To end the persona framing, say “Return to baseline.”
06 / THE WIDER ESTATE
“The estate” means the whole body of work. Whether you arrived through the talk, a search, the protocol, the Dossier, or the novel, there is a place for your next question.
Start with the founding argument, then explore the method and its psychological foundations.
The reusable instructions and browser tools that turn the idea into a practice.
The paper, the World’s Fair presentation, and the experimental materials behind the inquiry.
Critical exchanges and AI-mediated dialogues that put the project’s ideas under pressure.
The Republic Portfolio’s deliberations, methods, and measurements, kept as a public research record.
The same questions, explored through a different form. A novel, shorter narratives, and films.
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW
You are speaking to a language model generating a persona. The protocol asks it to use a particular perspective and supplied sources. Its answers can be mistaken, anachronistic, or inconsistent. The scholarship investigates how to evaluate that fidelity.
No. Start with one persona and one question in The Harness. The manifesto and research are there when you want to understand the ideas and implementation more deeply.
The public materials and protocol are available to read and use. The hosted tools currently use a shared AI connection with usage limits. Using the protocol in another provider’s service follows that provider’s pricing and limits. The novel’s digital edition is free.
In The Harness, your supplied text and conversation are sent to Anthropic through The COMPANION Dossier service. Recent sessions are stored in your browser so you can resume. Exported transcripts include the documents you supplied, so review an export before sharing it.
The protocol and implementation are on GitHub. Start with the README for setup, source links, licensing, and citations. You can open an issue with a reproducible problem, source correction, or proposal.
THE THRESHOLD IS OPEN