When the subscription runs out, that's a scheduling problem

Subscription tiers ration capacity, not just tokens: a session cap, a rolling window, a weekly quota. Anchor now has doctrine for what an agent does when it hits one — and a /commit-prep that actually ships to your projects.

The failure that looks like success

An agent that hits a usage limit and gives up wastes your afternoon. An agent that hits one and quietly finishes the job on a weaker model wastes something worse, because the work looks done. The second failure is the dangerous one, and it is increasingly common in harnesses that silently downgrade your tier mid-session rather than stopping.

anchor/capacity-routing.md is the doctrine, scaffolded into every project as .anchor/capacity-routing.md. It first separates a capacity limit from a transient one: a per-minute rate limit resolves with one backoff and a retry, a weekly cap does not. If the error names a reset hours or days out, retrying it in a loop buys nothing but wall-clock and log noise.

Then it works a fixed order — reroute, else wait, else stop and report, always after checkpointing to the in-progress plan.

Reroute is gated on a fitness floor

This is the part that matters, and the part a naive implementation gets wrong.

Model priority is an escalation ladder, not a menu of equals. Rerouting a rename or a formatting pass down a tier costs nothing. Rerouting architecture work, a security review, or a subtle debugging session down a tier produces confident, wrong output — precisely the failure Anchor exists to prevent. So the rule consults model fitness: if the task lands in the fallback model's weak column, waiting is the correct answer, and so is stopping.

A quota reset never sets the quality bar.

Rerouting also requires restating the work, because a different model is a different session with no memory of this one. Re-sending the last prompt loses the plan, the constraints, and every decision already made. So a reroute checkpoints first, restates the task spec on arrival, names the tier it moved to, and re-verifies inherited claims rather than trusting them — anything unverified stays (unverified) across the handoff.

The hard limits: never continue on a silently downgraded tier, never narrow scope or weaken tests to beat a cap, never fabricate completion. Partial work reported honestly beats a claimed finish.

This pays off most in multi-provider harnesses — Cursor, Cline, OpenRouter-backed tools, or an endpoints.yaml fleet — where a second model is one config line away.

/commit-prep now actually reaches your projects

While wiring the above, a related gap turned up. CLAUDE.md and GROK.md have long required /commit-prep before any git commit, and /work calls it. But the command was missing from the scaffold's platform map — so scaffolded projects were instructed to run a command they had never received. Grok's only copy sat at an abandoned path, unused since Grok moved to .grok/skills/*/SKILL.md.

Both now ship, covered by a test that asserts it:

anchor /path/to/project --platform claude,grok
ls /path/to/project/.claude/commands/commit-prep.md
ls /path/to/project/.grok/skills/commit-prep/SKILL.md
ls /path/to/project/.anchor/capacity-routing.md

The command body was also rewritten to be project-agnostic by discovery rather than by assumption. It treats your CI config as the authority on what "green" means, falling back to a task-runner target, then the language's default runner. It matches whatever release-note convention you already use — and when your notes are generated from Conventional Commits or PR labels, it tells you the entry belongs in the commit message instead of hand-editing a generated file. It follows an existing blog directory's conventions, or writes plain Markdown under docs/blog/ with no static-site generator required.

Every gate can skip with a one-line note. A pre-commit pass should never scaffold a test suite, a changelog, or a blog your project never asked for.