Two of these four assertions currently FAIL against the live cluster, which
is the point: mcpd there still renders `Secrets: bao-k8s* ✓` from the
rotation field, and its JSON status carries no live/ready pair. Per the
project rule the fix is to deploy, not to relax the assertion.
The status check specifically rejects a bare "name ✓" with no qualifier —
that string is the old rendering and proves the probe was never consulted.
Deliberately does not take the real OpenBao down. Simulating an outage
against shared infrastructure to satisfy a test would be worse than the
bug it covers; the outage paths are unit-tested with an injected clock.
Docs: adds a Reliability section (request hardening, the stale-while-error
table, the cold-cache gap and why persisting values is not the answer,
live-vs-ready) and replaces the stale "Kubernetes ServiceAccount auth is
not shipped yet" note — it shipped in 5152066, and it is what the live
backend has used since June.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018vybEitX4FykeMatKe5Xki
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