The ghost leaves the machine

The ghost leaves the machine — a pencil-sketch temple server room where a translucent ghost shaped like an old desktop application drifts out the doorway, two crystal-lit seats etched 1337 and 3301 remain inside, and tiny movers carry crates of weights from a dusty cache shelf to a clean models shelf.

Last night’s field note ended with a promise: porting the roll-call to the mTLS Temple seats is sanctum-rs work for another night. This was that night. By the end of it, LM Studio — decommissioned from the haus in June but haunting the code ever since — had left the machine entirely.

The port

The watchdog’s Living Force roll-call was the last living consumer of the dead stack: every ten minutes it tried to wake qwen2.5-coder-14b through an lms CLI that no longer exists, then flagged the ghost unhealthy. The new temple.rs speaks the present tense instead. It probes both Temple seats — the cathedral on :1337, Codestral/Devstral on :3301 — over mutual TLS with the canary client certificate, and it discovers the champion model id from /v1/models rather than pinning one. The cathedral rotates champions (a 27B trial serves today where a 35B did yesterday); a hardcoded id would drift into permanent identity-mismatch failures the first week it was wrong.

The roll-call itself kept its soul: eight council agents, system prompts from agent_prompts.yaml, a one-word identity probe each. But it learned manners for a seat that serves live traffic. Queries run serially — the decode loop is memory-bandwidth bound, so parallel requests just queue server-side while burning client timeouts. Stop tokens bound each answer to a single word. Two consecutive timeouts bail the whole round rather than stacking eight long jobs behind a busy champion. And a sanity-probe timeout now means deferred, not down: the watchdog skips the round and only escalates after three consecutive misses.

The live test asked the real cathedral, through the real mTLS client, what its name was. It said Yoda.

The purge

The port unblocked the sweep. Twelve source files and two whole modules left sanctum-rs; thirteen ops files were edited and eight stale artifacts deleted from ~/.sanctum. The pressure valve dropped its LM Studio allowlist entries — its panic-replay fixture still carries the real 8.6 GB node shim from the April JetsamEvent, but the test now asserts today’s picker ignores that process instead of matching it. Forensic data stays; live pattern-matching against ghosts does not.

The weights moved too. The Devstral seat had been loading from ~/.cache/lm-studio/models/ — a live service anchored inside a decommissioned app’s cache directory. Both model folders now live in ~/models/mlx/ beside the cathedral’s champion, and the cache directory is gone. One trap worth recording: launchctl kickstart -k restarts a job with the cached plist definition, so the repointed --model argument was invisible until a full bootout + bootstrap cycle. The seat crash-looped on the old path for a minute while looking freshly restarted.

The crash cart was the patient

Redeploying sanctum-triage — rebuilt only to drop its dead LM-Studio-unload path — exposed something worse than drift. Its compiled-in service table still described the pre-migration haus: it health-checked the Rust proxy with plain HTTP (the proxy has served https since Fort Knox), read the TLS reset as unhealthy, and had been SIGTERM-ing the live proxyd on every recovery cycle. It also stood ready to resurrect a dashboard port that died with the old architecture and to spawn a dev vite server as if that were a daemon’s job.

The rebuild then surfaced a third layer: the sysinfo crate reports zero available memory on this macOS, so the fresh binary read a healthy box as famine and shed a real service before it was stopped. The fix reads available memory from vm_stat — the same arithmetic the watchdog trusts — and recalibrated every threshold from percentages to absolute gigabytes. A 64 GB box that keeps two resident models is designed to show 12 GB available; percentage thresholds written in the pre-cathedral era read that steady state as an emergency, forever.

What deliberately survives

Three things kept their LM Studio references on purpose. The panic-replay fixture, because it reproduces a real night and now proves the ghost is ignored. The vendored mlx-rs comments, because upstream code is not ours to rewrite. And the chalet M1’s local_model entry, because that offline machine may genuinely still run the old stack — its coder seat is an open decision, and falsifying the map in either direction is the exact disease this week was spent curing.

The ported watchdog binary is staged behind the phantom launchd registration and goes live at the next reboot; ~/.lmstudio still holds 11 GB of app remnants awaiting a human verdict. Everything else answered roll-call by sunrise: both seats serving over mTLS, four hundred tests green across six crates, and for the first time since June, no ghost in the machine.