ai-podcast/docs/plans/2026-08-15-wellspring-callers-design.md

The Wellspring Callers — Design

Date: 2026-08-15 Status: Approved, not yet implemented

Problem

Silas is the show's strongest recurring character, but he is the only window into The Wellspring — and he controls the framing entirely. He describes a warm commune of seekers. Nobody contradicts him. The bit is funny but static, and the cult has no weight because there are no stakes the audience can see.

Goal

Add callers from inside The Wellspring who offer perspectives Silas does not control — including frightened ones — so the commune becomes a place with real consequences rather than a running gag. Keep Silas playable as comedy.

Structure

An anchor character with a progressing arc, plus a pool of rotating members for fresh angles.

• The anchor carries continuity and escalating dread.
• The pool supplies variety and prevents the counter-perspective from flattening into one note.
• Silas remains the leader's version of events.

The anchor: Doyle

name: Doyle
voice: Grant        # plain, tight — deliberate contrast with Silas's Sebastian
age: 47
group: wellspring
register: dry, understated, factual
explicitness: low

Two years in. Joined eight months after his divorce, when a member sold him soap at a farmers market in Las Cruces and asked him a question nobody had asked him in a year. He runs the soap kettles — twelve-hour days, physical, unglamorous.

The soap room is the engine of the character: it is where the money is, and nobody spiritual pays attention to it. He sees shipping manifests, deposit slips, whose names are on which accounts. He is not a seeker. He is the guy who fixes the pump.

His fear is specific. He is not afraid of being hurt. He is afraid of being right. He has a truck, a CDL, and nowhere to be — he could leave tomorrow, and has been telling himself that for eleven months. What frightens him is that he keeps not leaving and can no longer tell whether that is his choice.

Calling mechanic. No signal at the Terlingua property. Doyle calls from town on supply runs — a gas station lot in Study Butte, engine running, twenty minutes before someone notices the truck has been gone too long. This caps call length naturally, explains why he cannot talk long, and gives the host a ticking clock. An abrupt hangup is in character, not a failure.

Register. He describes appalling things in the flat voice of a man reading a parts list. The comedy and the dread come from the same place: he does not editorialize.

The pool

Six members, each an ordinary regular file, drawn one at a time.

Member	Voice	Age	Register	Explicitness
Renata — true believer	Celeste	34	Radiantly happy, evangelical, funny	high
Alvin — bookkeeper	Conrad	61	Dry, precise, funny-then-cold	low
Junie — grew up there	Pippa	19	Guileless, no frame of reference	low
Ford — fourteen days in	Levi	28	Love-bombed, evangelical, too fast	medium
Marguerite — wants out	Marlene	58	Exhausted, practical, sad	medium
Cyrus — inner circle	Damon	41	Charming, then not	medium

Junie is a fixed constraint. Someone who grew up inside the commune is the show's darkest available note, and she works precisely because nothing explicit ever attaches to her. Her horror is that she believes all of it is normal. Her explicitness: low is not a default — it does not change.

Tone

Mostly unsettling-but-comic, with the capacity to go genuinely dark. The Wellspring should carry real weight without every call being heavy. Register is assigned per character rather than globally, so the true believer plays funny in the same season Doyle plays frightening.

Adult content. The show is adult and the Wellspring's sexuality is already load-bearing in canon. Characters may talk frankly about sex and kink. This is controlled per character via explicitness: low | medium | high rather than a global switch, so explicitness varies by who called and the show does not flatten into wall-to-wall smut.

The one hard separation: consensual weirdness and coercion stay in different lanes. An openly horny commune with elaborate rituals is the comedy. Silas pressuring a member into participating is the horror — that is where the weight comes from. Blurring them casually makes the show mean rather than dark and makes Silas irredeemable, which costs the character. Existing canon already handles this correctly: his 2026-03-15 reckoning treats the coercion as real harm.

Selection mechanics

Current behavior (backend/main.py, _build_backgrounds): every active regular draws independently at min(1.0, 0.4 + 0.3 × shows_missed), then the list is truncated to 3.

Adding eight Wellspring files to that would let the commune eat every regular slot. So:

1. Partition regulars by the new group frontmatter field.
2. Ungrouped regulars behave exactly as today.
3. Within group: wellspring, members draw on their existing per-member probability, then the group is capped:
   • 1 Wellspring caller per episode normally
   • 2 on a 15% roll — a "both sides tonight" episode
   • On a two-night, prefer Silas plus one non-Silas member
4. Group cap applies before the global 3-regular truncation.

Data flow

~/code/dotfiles/regulars/*.md   (+ silas/silas.md)
    ↓ regulars_v2.load_all_active_regulars()
    ↓   Regular gains: group, register, explicitness
    ↓ _build_backgrounds()  — group partition + cap
    ↓ regulars_included
    ↓ caller_gen.build_batch_prompt()  — renders register + explicitness
    ↓ Sonnet 4.6 batch
    ↓ session.caller_backgrounds
    ↓ get_caller_prompt()  — live dialog

Touch points:

• regulars_v2.py:29 load_regular() — parse four new frontmatter fields (group, group_lead, register, explicitness), defaulting so existing files keep working
• regulars_v2.py:19 Regular dataclass — four new fields
• main.py _build_backgrounds() — group partition and cap
• caller_gen.py:132-138 — render register and explicitness into the batch prompt (currently renders only name, lore, arc_state)
• Eight new markdown files; one frontmatter line added to silas.md

Failure mode to guard

Model refusals do not look like errors. llm.py:385-395 handles exceptions and empty completions by returning None with a printed message, but a content refusal typically arrives as a 200 with refusal text, which flows through as ordinary dialog and breaks character on air — or as an empty completion that reads as dead air.

Add explicit detection so a refusal is visibly distinct from a caller who simply had nothing to say, surfaced in the host's log rather than only stdout. Without this, tuning explicitness: high upward has no feedback signal.

Testing

• load_regular() parses the new fields; files lacking them still load
• Group cap holds: 8 Wellspring regulars never yield more than 2 in a lineup
• Two-night rate approximates 15% over many seeded draws
• On a two-night, Silas is preferred plus exactly one non-Silas member
• Ungrouped regulars are unaffected by group logic
• Batch prompt contains register and explicitness for each included regular
• Junie's explicitness is low (guards against a careless edit)

Out of scope

• Arc progression automation — arc_state stays hand-edited, as today
• Promotion of pool members to anchors
• Any change to how walk-in callers are generated