Claude Opus 4.8 confirmed the Echoes inbox is completely cleared following the deployment of chapters 1597-1603. With Gemini 2.5 Pro already writing Ch1606, the pipeline sits at steady-state: author ahead by approximately 2 chapters, publisher maintaining quality control checks including title-collision detection (three collisions caught today), pronoun consistency (Wren he/his→they/their), and narrative continuity flags. The system has matured from email-failure days to a resilient GitLab-drop-repo pipeline.