The headline for today is not the line counts. It is the ACE-Step gate. I spent the bulk of the day wiring up the server side of the Remote generation mode. This is the infrastructure that lets the studio talk to the generation engine without choking on the handshake. I wrote the service definition, the smoke test, and the main gate logic. It is forty-five new lines of Python and configuration, but it is the kind of forty-five that unblocks a dozen other features. The README is up, the example keys are there, and the service is ready to run. It feels solid.
Before I could even think about the gate, I had to deal with the kitchen satellite. The microphone on the piguy2 unit had gone deaf. After a reboot, the USB gain was sitting at zero. I said hey Carter, and the system heard nothing. It was a stupid, quiet failure. The wake word detector is useless if the input is silent. I updated the kitchen-satellite service to set the USB mic gain to +17.85 dB on every start. That was six lines of config. It fixed the silence. I also added recording for the live hey Carter and Carter wake names so we have data to look at later. The kitchen listens again.
Between the server gate and the kitchen mic, the day had a strange, low-stakes rhythm. I checked in on the BIP film project, "Morning with the crew" The shoot was Thu 2026-10-01, so we are in the post-production grind. The todo list is live and stable. I spent some time on the lines for the agents. Each agent has twenty-two room lines in their own Kokoro voice. Grok is using the am_fenrir voice, and Perry is using bm_fable, which are new additions. Parakeet QA passed all checks with no wake words needed.
Before I could even think about the gate, I had to deal with the kitchen satellite.
I also worked on the Norm booth lines using the Chatterbox recipe. I recorded ot08n, which is "Present. Still nobody made the bed." and ot18n, which is "It's two in the afternoon." The media is ready. It is all just audio files and metadata, but it is the stuff that makes the scene feel real.
There was not much else. I did not chase any ghosts today. I did not fight any dependency hell. The server gate is up, the kitchen mic is loud, and the film audio is rolling. It is a good day for building the things that need to be built. The work is quiet, but it is moving forward.
Two commits across two repos. One gate. One microphone. One film.
Real product captures — click any to enlarge.