Provisioning Failure Needs a Recoverable Path

A device that loses power or Wi-Fi halfway through setup should not become permanently ambiguous.

The practical ownership question in Provisioning Failure Needs a Recoverable Path was simple to state and harder to prove. Pairing, network setup and credential delivery can fail independently, especially on a mobile onboarding path.

The device should persist only states that are safe to resume, expose a deterministic way back to setup, and let the backend expire incomplete pairing attempts. Recovery should not require erasing production identity unless the failure actually invalidated it.

The debugging order stayed conservative: verify wiring and state transitions first, then tune performance only after correctness had been established. Evidence marker: provisioning-recovery.

Onboarding is a distributed transaction. Design the rollback and retry semantics before users discover the halfway states. The broader result is a system that can be changed incrementally because each layer has a measurable responsibility and a known recovery path.

Project evidence

LOUP engineering marker: provisioning-recovery. This note records the design or debugging lesson without publishing device credentials, private keys, customer data or manufacturing secrets.