Bake-off in brainstorming

Use ce-bakeoff only when explicitly requested and the need and constraints are clear enough to develop competing product mechanisms. If the goal itself is unsettled, finish discovery first. Preserve specific settled decisions; do not invent a fork to satisfy the request.

Resolve model preferences using the activation-resolution rules in references/reasoning-elevation.md. Pass the resolved preference, including explicit restrictions, to ce-bakeoff with the full grounding dossier, relevant dialogue and constraints, the specific question, settled decisions, budget, and product-mechanism fidelity. An explicit candidate model mix takes precedence. ce-bakeoff dispatches the fresh candidates and handles its own fallback; do not run the ordinary generation adapter for each baker. With no preference, allow Bake-off's default model-family exploration.

This replaces the ordinary generation call for the selected question. The session orchestrator dispatches and persists the returned artifacts; read-only elevated authors do neither. Do not produce an ordinary approach set before or after the competition for the same question.

Bake-off selects a recommendation, not a user-approved Product Contract. Return to Phase 2 (Explore Approaches) with the complete result, present viable options before the recommendation, and keep the existing rules: approaches stay at the product-mechanism level rather than architecture, choices that turn on how something feels are offered to ce-prototype, and scope is confirmed before writing. Keep incomplete or unresolved outcomes visible; obtain the missing product input when it prevents a defensible recommendation. Incorporate the decision record into the existing artifact rather than create another canonical plan.