Local Kubernetes Development with Tilt: Fast Inner Loop

Most Kubernetes teams debug their platform in the one place it does not run: their laptop. Production is 82% likely to be Kubernetes (CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey, 2025, up from 66% in 2023), yet the local dev loop is often a Docker Compose file that quietly disagrees with the real cluster on namespaces, RBAC, and service discovery. We rebuilt our inner loop around a real local Kubernetes cluster driven by Tilt, and it changed how fast — and how honestly — we could iterate on a multi-service backend. This is the setup, the pattern, and the one bug it caught that a mock never would have. Key