Project assets — files, images & screenshots as evidence

The biggest credibility gap is personas reasoning from prompts instead of real material. Assets close it: any file — a screenshot of your onboarding, a pricing page capture, an interview note, a PDF — attaches to a research project as first-class, citable evidence with a stable id. brief_council automatically puts every project asset in the room, so reactions are grounded in what is actually there.

Attaching

# MCP (the natural path — an agent attaches material while it works):
attach_asset(project_id, path="/tmp/onboarding-step2.png", title="Onboarding step 2")
attach_asset(project_id, content_base64=…, filename="interview-01.md")
attach_prototype_shot(project_id, prototype_id)   # screenshot a registered prototype

# CLI parity:
sonaloop asset-attach <project_id> ./pricing.png --title "Pricing page" --notes "v2 draft"
sonaloop asset-list <project_id>
sonaloop asset-remove <project_id> <asset_id>

Binaries land in the content-addressed store (data/assets/<hash>.<ext> — the web app serves it at /data/assets/…); the record lands on the project. Ids are content-addressed per project, so re-attaching the same bytes is an idempotent upsert. kind (image | screenshot | document | file) is inferred from the extension. Attaching emits the asset.attached lifecycle event (docs/lifecycle-hooks.md).

The multimodal contract

Images are evidence, not just storage: view_asset(project_id, asset_id) returns the actual image over MCP, so the host LLM looks at it with its own eyes before authoring persona reactions — no in-process vision, no OCR. Text documents carry an inline excerpt (quoted directly in council briefs); other binaries are cited by id.

In a council brief, every project asset rides each participant's agent_context as an EVIDENCE ASSETS IN THE ROOM block: image assets instruct the host to view_asset them first; document excerpts are inline.

Persistence

• Assets appear read-only on the project page in the web inspector (thumbnails for images, served from the static /data mount).
• export-snapshot now includes research projects and copies asset binaries to data/export/assets/; import-snapshot restores both — the evidence survives the portable round-trip.