Empty 200 Response Bug Fixed With a Lease Contract, Not a Retry Logic

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A team running a nightly triage job on a free server discovered that their HTTP client was receiving 200 responses with empty bodies from a free model endpoint, silently marking failed calls as successful. This caused misrouted alerts the following morning, with no visibility into the fact that the model had returned nothing. The initial fix of adding a retry made things worse, as a second call could also return an empty or malformed 200 response, doubling downtime and masking the root issue. The correct fix was implementing a "lease" — a local contract around each API call comprising a total timeout, a response byte cap, a schema guard, and a deterministic fallback. The case, demonstrated using libcurl and nlohmann/json, highlights that HTTP 200 signals only transport success, not semantic validity, and that response contracts must be explicitly enforced in code.

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