fix(flows): flow-16 unsatisfiable Ready gate; flow-04 first-inference window on local models

[bussyjd]

Summary

Both release-gating FAILs from the rc14 release smoke on a local Ollama model (qwopus3.6-27b-v2-mtp:q5_k_m, 27B) reduce to flow bugs — the stack itself is clean. Diagnosed live against a reproducing cluster; full chain below.

flow-16 §2.2 — the Ready gate could never pass

The flow creates its offer with registration enabled and never runs obol sell register, so the controller keeps Ready=False / Registered=AwaitingExternalRegistration by design ("offer already serves paid traffic"). A Ready=True poll is unsatisfiable as written — flow-11 only polls Ready after actually registering.

It historically "passed" by accident: the gate grepped Ready=True against sell status output, which substring-matches PaymentGateReady=True whenever the condition ladder converged inside the window.

Fix: poll the serving condition set — UpstreamHealthy + PaymentGateReady + RoutePublished, anchored greps via obol kubectl jsonpath — over 300s. That set is exactly what §3's 402 probe then exercises.

flow-04 step 12 — window too tight, diagnostics swallowed

curl -sf --max-time 120 failed reproducibly (twice, warm model) on the first inference ever routed through the Hermes agent pipeline: Hermes prepends a multi-thousand-token system prompt, and a local Ollama model pays full prompt processing before the KV cache warms (~150s observed; Hermes' internal client retries re-pay it until one attempt survives). The very next call answers in ~20s — which is why step 13 passed seconds later in every run. GPU-class endpoints converge in seconds and never see this.

-f also swallowed the response entirely, so the fail line was the empty Agent inference failed — (which initially sent the investigation toward cold model loads and auth). Fix: 300s window, no -f, and the fail message carries HTTP status + body snippet.

Verification

• Live cluster in the failing state: new flow-16 gate passes where the old one cannot (UpstreamHealthy=True PaymentGateReady=True RoutePublished=True Registered=False Ready=False); the exact flow-04 request returns 200 with correct content once the prompt cache is warm.
• bash -n clean on both flows; with these fixes the rc14 wopus smoke is 12 PASS / 2 SKIP (the SKIPs are waived registration-receipt sub-checks, registrations themselves succeeded on-chain).