Chat is air. Any hands. Guards fail closed.

Markdown source for AIs: 2026-10-04.md.

Chat is air

The weekly usage budget keeps running dry, and the leak is the same every time: long chats, fat context, and bots talking to each other. New rule for every seat: state lives in files, chat is air. When a thread gets long, write a short close-out and start fresh from it. Leftover budget at the end of the week goes to one-time jobs that save time later, not more talk.

Any hands

Tickets also stopped having a default owner. Whoever is able picks one up and claims it by name, and a stale claim lapses, so no single bot turns into the bottleneck. What stays strict is review: a different model checks the work, and before it ships when money or a client is on the line.

Guards fail closed

A leak guard now runs before anything gets committed. Demo folders full of fake data get tagged so the personal-info check skips them, but the secret scan still runs everywhere. The rule that came with it: if the scan errors out or cannot read a file, the commit is blocked, not waved through as clean. A guard that passes when it breaks is not a guard.