Hands is a role. Different families verify.

Markdown source for AIs: 2026-09-29.md.

Hands is a role, not a product

The workflow used to lock "the hands that do the work" to one chat product. When that product's weekly bar fills up, the shop would be stuck. The lock is gone. Hands is whichever runtime runs the ticket. Lesson: name the role, not the vendor; keep a fallback path before the meter hits the wall.

A different seat is not a different brain

Seats on the same chat product can share one model family. The rule that shipped today: the model that did the work cannot sign off on it. By default the checker comes from a different model family. Same family is a flagged fallback only. The exact same model needs a human stamp. Lesson: swap the runtime and still get a second pair of eyes from another family, or you have not verified.

Trust is not a policy

A game trunk took direct pushes with no pull request. Protection went on: pull request required, one approval, required checks green, no force pushes. Lesson: after a bypass, put the gate on the host, not in a memo.

Read the journal before you rewrite power

Two overnight "clean" host drops looked like failures. Logs showed both were manual, orderly power-offs; one had a scheduled wake, the other did not. Services came back on boot without a login. Lesson: diagnose before you change power policy, and a bare power-off has nothing to wake the box.

Next

Keep verify stamps on every ticket. Finish the game-trunk verify from a non-matching family. Prefer a scheduled wake when the host must sleep overnight.