decisions: opus leads the day's venture alone; fable is out

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017K4vyY3yUD3GsvoZaAtKkD

AGENTS.md

@@ -17,8 +17,10 @@ record; nothing here is scaffolding from before 2026-10-14.
  seat, gets each PR reviewed by the council, and merges on approve + green CI, engine code included. Only the workflow
  directories (`.github/workflows/`) stay a human's merge: the CEO batches them. A card whose PR already exists (Codex, a
  chat, the CEO) is adopted: labelled `ready`, it is reviewed and landed, never rebuilt. Housekeeping sweeps daily (13:17).
- Ventures: `venture.yml` every 6 hours (TIME_VENTURE=on). Fable chairs and judges; haiku, sonnet and opus pitch and
- vote; `claude:sonnet` builds. Each venture lives at <slug>.yolopreneur.lol (gh-pages `ventures/<slug>/`); the
+ Ventures: one a day, built for quality (`venture.yml` ticks every 6 hours, TIME_VENTURE=on); the day's card starts
+ once every other venture card is launched or held. Opus leads alone: a research round over the trending repos and the
+ studio's track record, one pick, the plan, the build (`claude:opus`) and the judging (a 1-10 score: under 8 earns
+ polish rounds, then it launches with its score); sonnet drafts the launch posts. No fable. Batches (off) keep the board. Each venture lives at <slug>.yolopreneur.lol (gh-pages `ventures/<slug>/`); the
  portfolio at yolopreneur.lol is gh-pages `ventures/index.html`, made by hand, and reads `ventures.json`.
  Seat workers (and the venture builder) carry Ponytail's rules (time `.github/time/rules/ponytail.md`); reviewers don't.
  Tiers: Luna = haiku (Codex: luna), Terra = sonnet (terra), Sol = opus (sol), Astra = fable (astra), the C level. Venice

docs/decisions.md

@@ -88,3 +88,5 @@ Format: date · decision · why. Add at the bottom. Never edit an old entry; sup
 - 2026-10-18 · **The venture loop runs on Teahub with the Claude seats, every 6 hours.** Fable chairs (the launch plan, the launch drafts) and judges the build; haiku, sonnet and opus pitch, vote and write plans; `claude:sonnet` builds and `claude:opus` takes the second fix round. The engine had coerced every builder to a Venice seat, which is where the token burn that paused the 20-minute loop came from. Ported to Gitea in time#140 (three council rounds with haiku; the second found that the loop would have written over the yolopreneur.lol portfolio), schedule in time#141. The GitHub-era venture cards were closed: their migrated history is authored by `teahubxyz`, Time trusts only its own beats, and they would have been re-pitched as new ventures. Why: the owner's call, to try the loop on the Claude API with fable leading and the other three voting and executing.
 - 2026-10-18 · **Daily pacing at $25 for today's first Claude venture run**, on the owner's OK; back to $15 once it is through. `TIME_MONTHLY_USD` stays 100 (the month was at $30.40). The andon (time#136) is closed. Why: the day's $15 was spent before the loop came back, and the owner wanted the run now rather than after midnight.
 - 2026-10-18 · **Ponytail on prod.** Seat workers, and the venture builder through them, carry Ponytail's rules (DietrichGebert/ponytail, MIT, vendored at time `.github/time/rules/ponytail.md`); reviewers, Astra and the board don't (a coding ruleset distorts answers that aren't a diff). `TIME_PONYTAIL=off` drops it. Why: the owner's call; it had run on hb-5's seats since 2026-10-12 and prod never had it. (time#145)
+- 2026-10-18 · **One venture a day, built for quality.** The day's card waits until every other venture card is launched or held. The board picks it from a field of six pitches, made in rounds where each round is told what is already pitched. `claude:opus` builds: the code's default, and `TIME_VENTURE_WORKER` on teahubxyz/time. Fable's judge also scores the product 1–10 and names its top three changes. A page under 8 gets up to two polish rounds; the third round stays for fixing whatever a polish broke. After that it launches with its score: quality never holds a launch for a human, only a broken page does. Batches stay off, and an open batch card with no Time beats no longer starts one. The caps are unchanged. October has $61 left in the $100 envelope; if one opus venture a day and the heartbeat outrun that, the loop waits at the cap rather than spending past it. Why: the owner's call ("would rather 1 higher quality"). Today made four ventures: three from migrated batch #26 and the daily card. All four passed on the first sonnet build in about ten steps, so nothing had pushed any of them past "works". (time#162, #163)
+- 2026-10-18 · **Opus leads the day's venture alone; fable is out of the venture loop.** One research round replaces the pitches and the vote: opus reads the top six trending repos with the start of their READMEs, plus the studio's track record (each venture's status and signups), lists six candidates and picks one. Opus also writes the plan without a synthesis step and judges the build, and hands the launch-post drafts to sonnet. The chair and the judge are opus. That is the code's default, and `TIME_VENTURE_CHAIR` / `TIME_VENTURE_JUDGE` are set to opus so that tonight's run is already fable-free. Batches keep the board; `TIME_VENTURE_LEAD=board` brings it back for the daily venture. Why: the owner's call ("fable eats a lot of credit"). Fable was $2.23 of the day's $23.66, the dearest seat per call, on work opus does as well; the builds were most of the rest. (time#164, #165)