The pod finally answered, and answered "Model 'bge-m3' is not available.
Use one of: " — with NOTHING after the colon, despite being seeded with
five models and successfully taught a sixth.

Two causes, both only visible on a real pod.

REGISTERING A MODEL WAS HALF DONE. Both the boot seed and
/v1/models/register wrote models_data, but request validation asks the
MODEL MANAGER for its allowed identifiers. A model in the catalogue that
the manager never heard of is refused. Registration now calls the right
setter per section, maps the alias a request actually uses (bge-m3 ->
BAAI/bge-m3), and widens the engine's assigned-model set — a model
registered at runtime was assigned by nobody and would otherwise be
usable but invisible.

AND THE SEED WAS FILTERED OUT BEFORE IT GOT THERE. A pod runs front plus
engine; the front computes each engine's assignment from models.json, and
the seed is deliberately in-memory only, so the engine was told to
register nothing — dropping exactly the models the pod was rented for.
Seeded entries now survive that filter.

Separately: both engines rented their own pod again, 45 seconds apart,
because a pod takes ~2.5 minutes to boot and the sharing check only saw
READY pods. A pod is now registered at creation, and a sibling that finds
one still booting WAITS for it instead of renting a second card.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0182DhR1eFNPQyGmDrpHbedY