What changed

• Make CE model-gateway credentials come exclusively from local settings.db, while EE remains deployment-environment backed.
• Stop copying dynamic CE gateway credentials into process environment variables.
• Rotate Hermes workers when the effective gateway changes and make Cognee report that CE must restart after an initialized gateway changes.
• Route Freezone image reverse prompting, local mark detection, and video-frame analysis through one PydanticAI multimodal gateway using DC-freezone-vision-LLM.
• Align image reverse-prompt credit lookup with the actual visual model and remove obsolete provider/model request overrides.
• Update CE configuration docs, environment checks, acceptance checks, and model-configuration labels.

Why

CE could retain or resolve stale environment-backed credentials after users changed the selected NewAPI channel, which caused invalid-token failures and inconsistent behavior between Hermes, Cognee, and media/text generation paths. Freezone visual tasks also had separate direct OpenRouter/Google paths and mismatched pricing/model selection.

This makes NewAPI the single compatibility boundary while keeping CE and EE credential ownership explicit.

User impact

• CE users configure the official or bundled NewAPI channel in Settings; dynamic credentials are no longer sourced from .env.
• Hermes follows gateway/key changes without restarting the API process.
• Cognee clearly requires a CE restart if it was already initialized before a gateway/key change.
• Freezone visual-understanding tasks share one configurable multimodal model.

Validation

• uv run pytest: 1671 passed, 16 skipped; one wheel-artifact test could not download hatchling because the sandbox had no network.
• Post-rebase focused regression suite: 312 passed.
• uv run ruff check src/novelvideo tests scripts/check_env_config.py
• uv run python scripts/check_env_config.py
• Translation JSON validation with jq empty
• git diff --check
• Local self-hosted Docker API/Web build succeeded; API and NewAPI containers reported healthy.