v2.23.0 — five model ids had stopped resolving, and nothing noticed

A vendor-drift release. Nothing in the collection knew the difference between a
model that works and a string that used to, so five models had quietly stopped
resolving and two flags had quietly stopped doing anything. The fixes matter
less than the guard added alongside them.

Fixed — three image models had been dead for five weeks

Google shut the Imagen 4 endpoints down on 2026-06-30. google_image.py went on
mapping imagen-4, imagen-4-ultra and imagen-4-fast to those exact retired
ids, priced them, documented them across thirty files, and listed them in
--help. Nothing in the suite could tell a live model from a string that used to
resolve, so the breakage survived twelve releases.

• Gemini image family replaces Imagen. nano-banana-pro (gemini-3-pro-image),
  nano-banana-2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image) and nano-banana-2-lite
  (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image). Nano Banana Pro also loses its -preview
  suffix, which was the GA id drifting out from under it.
• The retired slugs still resolve. config.register_deprecated() aliases each
  one onto its successor and prints a single warning line. A vendor shutting a
  model down does not get to break a user's script.
• nano-banana-pro was underpriced by 2.7×. The table said $0.05/image;
  Google charges $0.134 at 1K/2K and $0.24 at 4K. Estimates below the real bill
  are the one direction this table must never round, since they also decide
  whether the confirmation prompt fires. estimate() now understands 4K tiers.

Added — a guard so this class of rot is loud next time

tests/unit/test_model_registry.py pins every vendor model id, asserts that each
registered provider is priced and each priced entry is reachable, checks that
deprecation aliases resolve, and fails after 120 days without a manual
re-verification. It found an unpinned lyria-3-pro id on its first run.

Added — install as a Claude Code plugin

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json + plugin.json, so
/plugin marketplace add Mikefluff/skills works alongside the curl installer.
tests/unit/test_plugin_manifest.py validates the schema, checks the declared
skill path actually holds skills, and pins the version across VERSION,
package.json, skills.json and both manifests — package.json had drifted to
1.9.0 while VERSION reached 2.22.0. scripts/bump.sh now syncs all of them.

Changed — Sora 2 is on a countdown

OpenAI announced on 2026-03-24 that the Videos API and both Sora slugs are
removed on 2026-09-24, with no successor. The providers warn on every call
with the days remaining, video-prompt carries a migrate-by-capability table,
and reel-builder routes long shots to Kling 3.0 (15s) instead.

Fixed — the music layer had the same rot, plus two live bugs

• Lyria pointed at a model id that does not exist. lyria-3.0-pro-preview
  vs the published lyria-3-pro-preview. Same failure shape as Imagen, caught by
  the new registry guard the moment the provider was touched. Added
  lyria-3-clip (lyria-3-clip-preview, 30-second tier) alongside it.
• Eleven Music ignored --duration. The provider sent duration_seconds;
  the API field is music_length_ms. Every run came back at the vendor default
  length regardless of what was asked for.
• Eleven Music dropped lyrics. A top-level lyrics key was sent, which is
  not in the request schema, so "sing these words" produced instrumentals or
  invented words. Lyrics are now folded into the prompt, which is how that API
  takes them. Also defaults to music_v2 (the API still defaults to music_v1)
  and passes force_instrumental.
• Suno is honest now. There is still no public self-serve API — no console,
  no key page, no endpoints. The provider pointed at api.suno.com while the
  docs promised api.suno.ai; neither answers. SUNO_API_URL is now documented
  as required rather than optional, and the gate message names eleven-music and
  lyria-3-pro as the first-party alternatives.
• Udio was listed as having an API. It never has. Documented as prompt-only,
  along with the UMG/WMG walled-garden transition that gates exports.
• reel-builder no longer defaults music to Suno, since that default could not
  run without third-party infrastructure.

Changed — audio stack caught up

• ElevenLabs TTS defaults to eleven_v3 (70+ languages) instead of
  eleven_multilingual_v2. v3 rejects the v2 similarity_boost knob, so
  voice_settings is now built per model family rather than sent blindly.
• gpt-4o-transcribe and gpt-4o-mini-transcribe join whisper-1. They are
  more accurate and up to half the price, but emit json/text only — asking one
  for SRT fails with a message instead of handing subtitle-burner something it
  cannot burn.

Changed — model registry refreshed

Veo 3.1 Lite ($0.08/sec), Runway Gen-4.5 (gen4.5), Ideogram 3 Flash. Docs
updated for Midjourney V8.1, Seedream 5.0 Pro/Lite (layered PNG output),
Ideogram 4.0 (open weights, JSON-first prompting — no v4 API endpoint yet, so
execution stays on v3), FLUX 3 and Muse Image (no public API, documented only).
docs/ROADMAP.md was twelve releases stale and claimed six shipped skills were
still planned.