Older CLIs sometimes called POST /cli/mesh/create without a pubkey, and the broker stored the string 'pending' as peer_pubkey on the owner's mesh.member row. Every subsequent hello from the real CLI failed the membership lookup silently, leaving the connection in 'reconnecting' forever with no useful log line. Now: validate pubkey is 64 hex chars before creating the owner member row. Existing 'pending' rows on prod were patched manually. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>