A Free Model's Server Passed My Smoke Test, Then Hung on Shutdown. The Exit Contract Caught It.

We spend a lot of time testing whether a service can start. We spend far less time testing whether it can exit. A free model can scaffold an HTTP server, and a free server can host it, but if the process cannot stop cleanly, cheap compute becomes expensive: stuck containers, half-open sockets, and failed restarts.

For this experiment I used MonkeyCode's free model access to generate a minimal Python server, and I planned to run it on the free server option. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. I did not compare model quality or quote benchmarks; the only thing I tested was observable process behavior.

The generated server looked fine

The first version looked like a normal smoke-test pass:

from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler, ThreadingHTTPServer