If your local-Ollama agent has been getting quietly worse for no obvious reason — same model, same hardware, same prompts — there's a good chance you're hitting an invisible ceiling that produces no error, no warning, and no log line. Just an empty response where an answer used to be. I want to walk through how this manifests, why it's specifically painful for autonomous agent workloads (not chat)
At 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in Q3 2024, our production Kotlin 2.0 microservice fleet hit a 92% memory utilization threshold across 140 nodes, traced to a silent coroutine leak in Ktor 2.2’s request pipeline that had been bleeding 12MB of heap per second for 72 hours. We lost $14k in SLO credits before we found the root cause. A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury (78 p