Local AI Needs Data-Plane Health Checks
My local AI mesh said the peer was online while every inference packet was getting dropped by a VPN killswitch. The fix was not another heartbeat. It was a real data-plane probe.
Rob··10 min read
Practical writing on deploy risk, runbooks, incident response, dependency changes, and the habits that keep small engineering teams out of avoidable fire drills.
My local AI mesh said the peer was online while every inference packet was getting dropped by a VPN killswitch. The fix was not another heartbeat. It was a real data-plane probe.
I built a peer-memory endpoint so my Mac can query my Linux box's memory store over a WireGuard mesh. The first measurement felt suspiciously clean. I measured three times before publishing.