Patterns / Herald
pattern study
Herald
A written-sequence agent that branches into a voice persona for the first reply. Same prose voice on the page and in the ear.
The bottleneck
Imagine a B2B software company with one outbound rep who turns a cold reply into a discovery call at three times the team's rate. The team has read her sequences. They have copied her sequences. The replies still land differently. When prospects get on the phone, they say they want to talk to her, not to whoever picks up.
What the company wants is a system that writes outbound in her voice at the volume of a whole team, and picks up the first reply on the phone in the same voice.
The shape
Herald is a written-sequence agent with a voice fork. The sequence agent runs the outbound, learning from the rep's history of past sends. When a reply lands, the system routes it: if it is a question, an objection, or a yes, it forks to the voice persona for the first human-feeling reply.
The voice fork is the hardest piece of the pattern. It uses the same prose corpus as the written sequence: same diction, same pacing, same restraint. The corpus lives in the voice layer of the memory model and is read at the last step, never used for reasoning. The handoff to a human happens on the second beat, when the call is real.
This is a pattern study: the scenario is a composite with the identifying details invented, and the shape is real. The architecture is written up in full in Aegis; read that for the deliberation pattern, then imagine it with one advisor instead of six and a voice on the other side. If you'd like the variant adapted to your domain, send a brief.