v12.3 -- it is an MCP connector for Google Cloud, and it is not Claude-only

v12.3 — it is an MCP connector for Google Cloud, and it is not Claude-only

Full release tree at commit 9d90a3bb9afa709e23beda285bd930c05f052392 of the source repository,
published by the product's own gh_commit reading each blob straight out of its own git store.
MANIFEST.txt lists every file and its digest. 104 files. Nine paths move, plus one screenshot.

THE README NOW LEADS WITH THE PRODUCT. It opened by calling this "an agent platform"; it opens
now with what it actually is — an MCP connector that gives a chat hands on your own Google
Cloud project. Point any MCP client at it, ask for software, and it builds the container,
deploys it to Cloud Run in your project, and reports the HTTP code it got when it checked.
The client-agnostic property was buried in a bullet that called this "effectively a
Claude-to-GCP connector". It is now a headline, and it is a measured claim rather than an
aspiration: the session key travels as a TOOL ARGUMENT rather than a client-specific header,
and this exact install has now been driven end to end from two different vendors' clients.

GROK WORKS, AND IT WAS QUICK. Connect the MCP connector, paste a session key, and it drives
the same fleet: same GCP project, same tool surface, same internal git store. That is the
whole integration.

NEW SECTION — TWO MODELS, TWO PLANS, ONE PROJECT. How this fleet is actually run, written up
because it is the reason client-agnosticism earns a headline instead of a footnote.

Claude Max is the architect: design, the calls that are expensive to get wrong, release
cuts, and the security review — Opus 5 on high effort reading the diff and asking what
breaks.

Grok is the engineering loop: long mechanical passes over a large tree, inventories,
refactors, hunting every call site of a thing being removed. It is stellar at this and
patient in a way that is expensive to buy from a reasoning model.

Claude in Chrome is the bridge: Cowork drives a browser tab logged into grok.com, so the
architect hands work to the engineer and reads the result back with no human copy-pasting
between two windows.

Two sets of eyes on every line, and they are not the same eyes — a disagreement between two
vendors' models is the one signal a single model cannot give you at any price, and more than
one defect in this release was found because the second model refused to agree with the first.
And the economics are the point: reasoning tokens are the expensive ones, so spend them on
architecture and review while a second plan absorbs the grind.

WHAT MAKES IT WORK IS THAT BOTH CHATS AUTHORISE INTO THE SAME PLACE. Neither model holds a
Google credential. Each presents a session key to the same OAuth-connected MCP connector, the
control plane resolves it to a role server-side, and from there they share the same GCP
project, the same MCP tools, the same internal git store with its objects sealed under X-Wing
(ML-KEM-768 + X25519), the same data lake and the same journal. Work one model does is visible
to the other because it was never in a chat window to begin with. The Flow Hood is the control
panel for that — where strains are created and managed, and where each harness's session paste
comes from — so putting a second model on the same fleet is a paste, not an integration.

THE WORD "BUS" IS RETIRED, IN ALL THREE PLACES IT SURVIVED. The runners are gone — 12.0 deleted
all 22 files under runner/ and the autonomous loop with them — but README, FEATURES and SECURITY
still described "model buses". What actually survives is models.fleet_mode, which governs ONE
thing: the console's own built-in chat. The connector itself makes no model call at all; your
client is the model. All three documents now say that, and each says the word is retired and
why, so nobody goes looking for a dispatcher that does not exist.

ALSO IN THIS RELEASE: gh_tag and gh_release. This repository advertised v10.5 as its Latest
release while main carried v12.2 — three releases behind, for eleven days — because gh_commit
could publish the whole tree and could not name the version it had just published. Verified
live in the deployed revision, from the server's own log rather than a client's cache:
[ghtools] registered 12 tools, up from 10.

Apache-2.0. Your project, your bill, your key.