Shut down department-heads as an intake path for engineering work - I raised it to product, they will either ask for it or they will not

Situation

In a #department-heads thread about who owns and maintains the C3 RPMs and about hardware certification playbooks, Ryan Smith offered to tweak Gauntlet to run certification playbooks and asked for hardware to be sent to him. Peter cut it off directly: this channel is not how work gets in front of engineering. He restated the path he had actually used - he asked who maintains it, got back currently nobody, and took the follow-up question of whether it should be publicly visible to product, where Brady Dibble owns it. If product asks for it, it becomes a project and gets the right people and the right hardware support.

Reasoning

Peter is protecting the intake path, not the work. He is fine with the work happening - he explicitly said if product asks for it we will make sure it gets the right people and the right hardware support - but he will not let a leadership channel become a place where a capable person volunteers, gets informally green-lit, and starts consuming engineering capacity without ever passing through prioritization. The reasoning is procedural rather than about the merits of certification automation, which he did not argue against at all.

Additional Context

The thread began with Nathan Blackham asking who built the C3 RPMs so he could test a DGX Spark, and widened into hardware certification, Canonical comparisons, and Gauntlet. Peter had already routed the ownership question to product earlier the same day. Ryan took the correction well and said he should have stopped at will wait for Brady.

Observed Evidence

Direct quote from Peter on 2026-08-28, plus his earlier message in the same thread laying out the path he actually used. Ryan replied youre right, I should have stopped at will wait for Brady.

Matching Patterns

Confidence Breakdown

Reasoning Depth Analysis