The Supervisor is the optional larger model — a delegate, not a parallel worker. The philosophy: delegate maximally to the cheap Operator; the Supervisor exists so a hybrid stack ships every time. Forcing the small model to do everything is bravado; hybrid is how RHA is used when you actually ship.
Resolves Test Suite IR then hands off — the Supervisor runs the front-end (feature enumeration, probing, encoding, suite construction, stub fixes), freezes the contract, and hands build + repair to the Operator. High-leverage reasoning on the strong model, high-volume traversal on the cheap one. Resolves ALL Operator failures — steps in on any failed recheck. Resolves ONLY Operator escalations — engages when the Operator stalls or exhausts its budget. "All failures" is a superset of "escalations only"; enabling both is fine — all-failures wins.
A Supervisor repair receives the node's full ledger lineage and more effort — but the same write boundary. More reasoning, never more write scope: escalation is not a regeneration backdoor. If the Supervisor also stalls, the node surfaces to the human, recorded in the ledger.
Badge color: tritium frost blue, above the Operator in the hierarchy. Requires at least one Operator.