The lead-user rotation used an in-memory pass counter reset to 0 on every pod restart, so the first-listed user always re-took the lead after a restart — a deploy-heavy session re-starved the last user (the pilot stalled at 2 summaries because each deploy reset his every-other-pass lead before the 2h tick fired). Derive the offset from wall-clock (floor(now/interval)) so it advances with real time and is identical across restarts: rotation stays fair however often the pod bounces. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>