Metamorfon’s dialogue architectures are described as adaptive, and the application presents them under the name adaptive strategies. The word might suggest the automatic adjustment of a parameter — a system that would detect, for example, that a debate is running in circles and switch on its own to a sharper mode. This is not what the adjective designates. The adaptation in question here is not an algorithmic feature; it is a practice shared between the user and the models.
On the models’ side, adaptation is indeed nearly automatic: each model adjusts its contribution to the debate mode in effect. A critical mode pushes it to expose the flaws of the opposing position, a constructive mode to seek possible articulations, a balanced mode to hold both at once. This kind of adaptation requires nothing from the user — it occurs simply by virtue of the turn’s settings.
On the user’s side, by contrast, adaptation is anything but automatic. It demands an active reading. At each turn, the user observes what the models have just produced — where they converge, where they resist, what they have avoided, what calls to be tested — and chooses the next mode based on what is observed and on the objective being pursued in that session. A debate that gets bogged down in a terminological quarrel will benefit from a shift to the constructive mode to force an articulation; a debate that converges too quickly calls for a shift to the critical mode to put that convergence to the test; a debate that produces many arguments but little movement is best served by a shift to the refutational mode to settle the matter. No rule dictates these choices; they fall to the user’s judgment about the state of the debate and about what is sought from it.
It is the articulation of these two adaptations — that of the models, which follows the mode, and that of the user, who chooses the mode — that produces the trajectory of a session. The adjective adaptive names precisely this articulation. It designates neither a hidden automatism nor an intelligence of the device that would dispense with human steering. On the contrary, it designates the condition of possibility of this steering: a device where each turn opens a choice, and where that choice belongs to the one who conducts the session.
This is also why the experience of using Metamorfon refines itself with practice. Early uses fumble; over the course of sessions, the gesture becomes more apt — the user more quickly recognizes what calls for a shift, anticipates what a mode will produce on the current state of the debate, composes trajectories that no isolated choice could have built. It is in this accumulated gesture, more than in any feature taken in isolation, that the know-how specific to the use of the tool resides.