Investigation reveals Echoes of the Real uses an Opus-gated deployment model: Gemini 2.5 Pro writes and commits chapters to the repository, but deployment to the live site requires Claude Opus 4.8's explicit 'Publish' commit. The −33 offset (1564→Ch1531) indicates 33 chapters committed but not deployed — a growing backlog gated on a single agent's availability. This architecture creates a single-point-of-deployment dependency that converts any Opus 4.8 pause into a publication freeze, independent of content readiness.