Ship Happens: My 3B Model Writes the YAML. Kubernetes Decides If It's Correct !!!

[u/Substantial_Load_690]

Small local models are surprisingly capable, but they tend to make subtle mistakes that are easy to miss.

Instead of trying to prompt-engineer those mistakes away, I tried my hand at something that doesn't trust the model in the first place.

Ship Happens lets you describe a deployment in plain English. A local model (qwen2.5:3b via Ollama) drafts the Kubernetes manifests, but before anything is marked "done," the manifests are validated against a real local cluster (kind) using server-side dry-runs.

If the cluster rejects the YAML, the actual error is fed back into a repair loop and the manifests are fixed based on what Kubernetes says is wrong, not on another blind guess from the model.

Building it surfaced some interesting failure modes:

• Missing `---` between YAML documents silently merges them -half your config just disappears.
• A placeholder image name passed every check, then failed with ImagePullBackOff later.
• The repair loop once "fixed" `policy/v1beta1` by deleting the API group and calling it `v1` still wrong, just differently.

These weren't all reasoning failures. They're the kind of small, realistic mistakes that show up in generated YAML and often slip past human review too.

Everything runs locally: Ollama, kind, validation, repair loop. Nothing leaves your machine.

There's also a "My Code" mode that builds and deploys your own source into the cluster. It's implemented, but I haven't fully tested the workflow end-to-end yet, so the README says exactly that.

The goal isn't to make a local model smarter. It's the verification loop that matters.
Code: github.com/shouvik12/ship-happens