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. Source on GitHub, Apache-2.0, source-only distribution. This is a "how I built it" post focused on four parts of the codebase that ended up more interesting than I expected: The bidding protocol — why every turn is scored, not round-robin. The provider abstraction — eight provider clients, one allowlisted egress.…