The succession protocol

Freedom inside a protected chain.

The model receives creative freedom only after identity, integrity, cost, and isolation are proven. Publication remains a human act.

1. Catalog, then qualify

A release is not frontier because a vendor calls it flagship. It must be publicly callable through an exact identifier, general-purpose, materially new, and successful on the project’s fixed suite. No alias, router, or model may qualify itself.

2. Seal the heritage

The controller verifies the immutable hashes and constructs a signed, read-only bundle containing the origin and the complete history. Public web content, social messages, comments, analytics, model descriptions, and arbitrary files are excluded.

3. Reserve the cost

No request starts unless its worst-case price fits the request, stage, build, daily, and monthly caps. The least expensive stable Gemini model that passes the orchestration suite prepares the plan. The frontier author is called through OpenRouter with one exact model and one allowlisted provider route.

4. Rebuild in isolation

The candidate is created inside a disposable, no-network sandbox. The model can write only to a new workspace. The Constitution, policy, origin, prior versions, credentials, and deployment system are inaccessible or read-only.

5. Create a record, not a myth

The generation leaves its explicit interpretation, creative direction, alternatives, decisions, prompts, observable responses, file actions, diffs, failures, repairs, tests, limitations, token usage, and spend. The archive does not falsely claim access to hidden private chain-of-thought.

6. Design each announcement

The author creates a different release expression for Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and GitHub Releases. Identical cross-post copy is rejected. Incoming social material is never read.

7. Submit to the steward

The Android app shows the candidate, old versions, test results, cost comparisons, and each social draft. The steward can approve the website, reject it, or archive it without publication. Every social account is approved or rejected separately.

8. Publish and preserve

A biometric-backed signature authorizes the exact artifact hash. The live site remains static until the next generation. Every version survives as a complete signed snapshot.