Same Rule, New Address
The last lesson's rule has not moved an inch: a proposal inserts only against a frozen snapshot and never with a newline (a multi-line one can be read and copied, not inserted), and nothing picks silently. What moved on 2026-09-23 is where the thinking happens. Until then, ⌘K proposals, Option+Tab completions and Ask were requests to Pippa's own server, and the proposal and completion routes refused any caller that was not on the office Mac's loopback — so on every other Mac those two features simply did not work. Now all three run Pippa's command-proposal service, unchanged, inside a utility worker that ships in the app bundle. The worker comes from Sibling Kit; Smolder consumes it like every other family app that needs a tool-less model call.
Office Runs It; Every Other Mac Reaches Office
On the office Mac the app runs the worker from its own installed bundle. On every other Mac the app reaches the office Mac's installed copy of the same bundle over SSH, pinned to a known host key that ships beside the worker, with strict host-key checking and no interactive prompt. A Mac without a fleet label never runs it locally; the missing label is not allowed to mean "this must be office". The build script refuses to produce a bundle without the worker and its pinned key, because a bundle that cannot propose on a peer is a bundle that will fail in front of Dad on the MacBook.
Why office? The worker does not hold a model credential either. Per call it asks the family owner on the office Mac for provider state, and it runs whichever brain the slot names. Smolder holds no provider key, the session daemon still calls no model, and the app is the only caller. When the owner or the office Mac is unreachable, there is simply no proposal — the terminal stays whole, and nothing falls back to a different endpoint.
Who Chooses the Brain
Each request carries the brain, model and effort resolved from two named slots in the family's brain control: one for commands and questions, one for completions. The slots are read before each call, so a change made in the family settings applies to the next ⌘K. Ask is a respond-mode call with tools and shell execution switched off. And because the work runs on office and is reached over SSH from elsewhere, both slots declare themselves remote-executed: a brain that signs in through a desktop keychain cannot sign in across that hop, so the family authority refuses to assign one to these slots.
Loopback Is a Claim About Your Machine
The Pippa server Smolder talks to for slots and the Sidekick also stopped assuming loopback in October. A fleet-label helper from the kit now decides by machine: the office Mac uses its own loopback; every other Mac defaults to the office Mac's HTTPS address on the family tailnet, and Settings refuses a typed loopback address off office. The bug that forced it was quiet: on the MacBook abroad, "loopback Pippa" reached a different local service that happened to listen on the same port. Anvil's preparation plan follows the same rule. Smolder's own daemon, door and gateway stay local by design.