feat: live-validated against Ollama Cloud; schema instruction fallback for cloud

Phase 8: all six live checks pass (tier aliases, thinking-tier chat, real
tool invocation, structured Generate[T], forced failover with bench+skip,
skill agent). Discovery: ollama.com ignores the format field — the
provider now also states the schema as a system instruction (constrained
decoding locally, instruction-guided JSON on cloud), with hermetic test.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

progress.md

@@ -1,5 +1,32 @@
 # progress
 
+## 2026-06-10 — Phase 8: live validation against real Ollama Cloud
+
+**All six checks PASS** (examples/live harness, OLLAMA_API_KEY from .env):
+1. Tier aliases (`thinking` = minimax-m3:cloud→kimi-k2.6:cloud,
+   `workhorse` = minimax-m2.7:cloud→qwen3-coder:480b-cloud) resolve via
+   Parse, incl. as a trailing chain element.
+2. Plain chat served by ollama-cloud/minimax-m3:cloud (189 in/48 out).
+3. Live tool call: the workhorse agent actually invoked get_launch_code
+   and answered from its result in 2 steps.
+4. Structured Generate[T] decoded {City:Tokyo Country:Japan
+   Population:14000000 Latitude:35.6762}.
+5. Forced failover: an unreachable head (connection refused = transient)
+   was retried, benched, and fell through to a live cloud tail; the second
+   request skipped the benched head without dialing it.
+6. Agent with the calc skill attached invoked calculate and answered
+   56161.
+
+**Discovery + fix:** Ollama Cloud ignores the `format` field entirely
+(verified with raw curl — markdown came back despite a schema). The
+ollama provider now also states the schema as an explicit system
+instruction (local stays constrained-decoded; cloud becomes
+instruction-guided); hermetic test added. The `:cloud`-suffixed model
+names work verbatim against ollama.com — mort's tier strings carry over
+unchanged.
+
+**Next:** Phase 9 — convert mort onto majordomo, open the PR.
+
 ## 2026-06-10 — Phase 7: examples, migration blueprint, README finalization
 
 **Landed:** `examples/` — nine runnable programs, one per hard requirement