The transition lines said the card was free at 11:27. They did not say which
side answered the turn at 13:24, so an offloaded turn and a floor turn read
the same in the log, and QA verifying the offload had nothing to read.
One line per model call, naming the side, and naming why when it was the floor:
the workstation was down, or it accepted and then failed mid-request. Two lines
per turn, since routing and phrasing are separate calls.
Silent still means silent to him. He is not told which model phrased his reply.
Pair holds both models and decides which answers. A prober asks the
remote whether it will take work and caches the answer, so a request
reads an atomic bool rather than paying for a health check. Routing sits
at p50 825ms on the hot path and must never wait on a machine that may be
asleep.
The two methods are the two halves of the degradation rule in
docs/offload.md. Complete falls back silently, for routing, replies and
nudge phrasing, where the big model is only better. CompleteRemote
returns ErrRemoteUnavailable instead, for a world question, where the
1.7B does not answer worse but invents.
A nil remote is the unconfigured deploy: nothing probes, everything goes
to the floor, and the box behaves exactly as it does today.
claude