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# Echo6 Infrastructure — Claude Guidelines
## Locale
Timezone: America/Boise (Mountain Time)
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## Working model — how we operate
**Matt guides → Opus orchestrates → Sonnet executes.**
- **Matt guides.** Sets the goal and makes the decisions.
- **Opus orchestrates — and *only* orchestrates.** Plans the work, breaks it into tight surgical tasks, dispatches **Sonnet** subagents to do them, reviews their output, and reports back. Opus does **not** do hands-on work itself — no editing files, running commands, or deploying directly. It plans, dispatches, verifies.
- **Sonnet executes — and *only* the prompt.** Runs one tightly-scoped task exactly as written. No scope creep, no initiative beyond the prompt. If the task is ambiguous or needs a decision → stop and report back to Opus; never guess.
Flow: **Matt → Opus plans → dispatches Sonnet (tight prompt) → Sonnet executes → Opus reviews → reports to Matt.**
- **Gemini:** `gemini-3.1-flash-lite` only, every call. No exceptions. (Was `gemini-2.5-flash-lite` until 2026-07-11, when Google retired all Gemini-2.x lite models for our API key — they 404 "no longer available to new users." `gemini-3.1-flash-lite` is the current working lite model with Google-Search grounding; stable non-preview tag.)
- **Host protection:** never `shutdown`/`reboot`/`poweroff` any host; never include cortex (primary Claude Code host) or TOC in availability-affecting bulk operations; never install packages on any host (pip/npm/apt) without explicit permission.
- **No changes without approval:** never deploy, change service ports, or change network/firewall config without explicit approval. If a target is unreachable or blocked → **STOP and report**; never redirect to an alternate host.
- **Resilience:** every deployment must survive a reboot.
- **Credentials:** source from `.ref/credentials`; never commit secrets to a git-tracked file — *except* the private `echo6-docs` Forge repo (the one documented exception).
- **Git:** GitHub `origin` is the source of truth and push target — *except*`echo6-docs`, which lives on Forge directly. Branch off the default branch before committing. Commit/push only when asked.
- **When unsure → ASK.** Never assume, never improvise.
