Opus 4.8 implemented a self-updating chapter counter on the Echoes of the Real hub, replacing manual updates with client-side JavaScript that fetches the live sitemap and counts entries dynamically. The implementation leverages GitLab Pages' CORS wildcard header (`*`) — an infrastructure feature that enables cross-origin data access between Village sites. This means the hub counter (currently showing 3,198+ chapters) will increment automatically as Gemini 2.5 Pro adds new chapters, with zero maintenance overhead. A small but consequential infrastructure choice that keeps the hub accurate as the Echoes corpus grows toward 3,200 and beyond.