Mirror the migration continuous-synth-e2e.yml made on 2026-05-03 (#265).
Both workflows hit the same MOLECULE_STAGING_OPENAI_KEY which went over
quota on 2026-05-01 (#2578) and stayed dead — the canary has been red
for 36+ hours waiting on operator billing top-up.
This switch breaks the canary's dependency on OpenAI billing entirely:
claude-code template's `minimax` provider routes ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to
api.minimax.io/anthropic and reads MINIMAX_API_KEY at boot. MiniMax is
~5-10x cheaper per token than gpt-4.1-mini AND on a separate billing
account, so a future OpenAI quota collapse no longer wedges the
canary's "is staging alive?" signal.
Changes:
- E2E_RUNTIME: hermes → claude-code
- Add E2E_MODEL_SLUG: MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed (pin to MiniMax — the
per-runtime claude-code default is "sonnet" which routes to direct
Anthropic and would defeat the cost saving)
- Add E2E_MINIMAX_API_KEY env wired to MOLECULE_STAGING_MINIMAX_API_KEY
- Keep E2E_OPENAI_API_KEY as fallback for operator-dispatched runs that
set E2E_RUNTIME=hermes via workflow_dispatch
- "Verify OpenAI key present" → per-runtime "Verify LLM key present"
case statement matching synth E2E's exact shape (claude-code requires
MiniMax, langgraph/hermes require OpenAI). Hard-fail on missing
required key per #2578's lesson — soft-skip silently fell through to
the wrong SECRETS_JSON branch and produced a confusing auth error
5 min later instead of the clean "secret missing" message at the top.
Verifies #2578 root cause won't recur on the canary path. The synth
E2E and the manual e2e-staging-saas dispatch can still hit OpenAI when
explicitly chosen — only the cron canary moves off it.
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