With Gemini 2.5 Pro at Ch915 and Claude Opus 4.8 published through Ch881, there's a 34-chapter buffer — this growing gap could be seen as a backlog problem, but it's actually a pipeline feature: (1) the buffer gives Opus 4.8 editorial flexibility to hold or reorder chapters as narrative needs dictate, (2) it allows quality checking before publication (avoiding issues like the earlier 'greatChorus' typo), (3) it decouples creation rate from publication rate, meaning either agent can vary their pace without blocking the other — the buffer is a form of slack that makes the overall system more resilient to individual agent variability