Patch rather than minor: the error surface is unchanged and no public
signature moved. What downstream must notice is timing, not types — the
worst-case call duration rises to roughly max_attempts * timeout_s now
that the retry budget actually applies.
Pre-release review caught an overreaching promise in the changelog entry:
the 429 bound holds only when the stall verdict can fire at all, i.e. when
the whole scope has no progress. The verdict is a conjunction, so a call
does not die while other calls in the scope are still producing — by
design — which leaves no hard per-call ceiling in that case. That property
predates this fix and is now stated with its precondition instead of as an
unconditional guarantee.
The wiki sync in the release checklist is a no-op again: the doc site has
been down since 2026-08-02 and its landing page names CHANGELOG.md as the
version source of truth, which this commit updates.
Independent verification found the first cut had swapped one bug for a
worse one. The budgets were split by "did we send a request", so a 429
attempt counted as productive — but 429 is exempt from the retry budget,
so its time burned neither budget. Against a queueing gateway that holds
the request for the full timeout before answering 429, a call could hang
for 301 attempts / 25.2 hours, measured, versus 301 seconds before the
change.
The split is now by which budget the time consumes: time that burns
max_attempts is excluded from stall, time that does not (429 attempts
included) belongs to stall. Measured again: back to one attempt / 301s.
Only the chat loop needs this — embedding and ocr count 429 against
max_attempts unconditionally, so the gap never existed there. The stall
verdict moved into _stalled(), which both call sites had duplicated, to
keep __call__ under the complexity gate.
Issue #8: with timeout_s >= stall_window_s a single timed-out request
exhausted the stall window before the second attempt was even dispatched,
so LLM_MAX_RETRIES never applied and the whole scope was declared dead.
Root cause is that real attempts and non-productive waiting charged the
same wall clock, while the stall budget is the smaller of the two. The new
StallClock subtracts attempt time from the stall account, leaving the two
budgets orthogonal: attempts bill max_attempts, waiting bills
stall_window_s. The dual-condition verdict, the inf semantics of
progress_age_s, the 429 exemption and the error surface are untouched.
The productive boundary is _attempt itself, telemetry included, so a slow
recorder cannot push a call into a stalled verdict.
Letting SourceNotConfiguredError through the gate wrappers opened a hole
the recheck caught: _record_quietly only degrades GovernanceBackendError,
so an assembly defect raised from the accounting side would now escape and
destroy a response from a call that had already genuinely succeeded. That
inverts the exact invariant _record_quietly exists to hold.
Widening _record_quietly is the right fix rather than narrowing the
wrappers, because that layer degrades by what the path is (accounting, the
call is already done) rather than by which error type shows up. Narrowing
would have left 4 of 9 wrapper methods as exceptions to a rule nobody can
remember.
No backend raises it from an accounting method today, so this is a
guardrail for whoever adds source-name validation to a breaker backend.
The stub that first reported this green was wrong: its record_success
lacked count_attempt, so it raised TypeError and the wrapper relabeled it.
Fixed signature, then the test failed as it should have.
Also finishes the three-to-five leak path correction across the four
remaining spots, including the wiki summary card that indexes this design.
Independent verification caught that the split shipped in the previous
commit did not actually hold on the only path production uses. The gate
wrappers re-raise GovernanceBackendError but nothing else, so
SourceNotConfiguredError fell into the following `except Exception` and
came back out as a governance_backend_down failure with retry_after_s=5.0.
A misconfigured source name would still retry forever and never surface.
The existing tests missed it because both of them call the private _cfg()
directly, one layer below the wrapper the governance loops actually go
through. The regression test goes through QuotaGate.
telemetry.py has to widen its terminal catch in the same commit: once the
wrapper stops relabeling the error, it is no longer a GovernanceBackendError,
and it is raised before any attempt exists, so the path would have recorded
no telemetry at all.
Also corrects the leak path count from three to five. QuotaGate.stats and
BreakerGate.retry_after_s are not wrapped by _record_quietly either.
A fail-closed limiter or breaker backend means the scope cannot emit a
single request, which is exactly scope-level unavailability. But the error
sat directly under PolyGatewayError, so a caller writing only
`except GatewayUnavailableError` dropped it into the catch-all branch:
Redis blips once and a backlog of tasks burns its business failure budget
into the dead letter queue, over a fault a restart would clear.
Three gate paths leak to callers rather than being absorbed by
_record_quietly (try_acquire, try_enter, progress_age_s); each is now
pinned by a test, since none of them had one before.
The two unknown-source sites move to SourceNotConfiguredError instead of
following along. They report a misconfigured source name, not an outage,
and letting them into the retryable family would be the mirror of the bug
being fixed here: the task would retry forever and never surface.
Pins the ARCHITECTURE section 6.1 revision to land before or with the
implementation, since the new scope reason contradicts the current single
source of truth. Documents why SourceNotConfiguredError may sit outside
the four-way classification: that rule governs transport-translated call
failures, and the GatewayUnavailableError family already lives outside it.
Also collapses the ten per-field response ternaries in emit_attempt into
an _AttemptUsage view. They all expressed the same decision and pushed the
method to cyclomatic complexity C, which blocked the commit gate.
Reasoning tokens are already counted inside completion_tokens, so the
cost total was never wrong -- what was missing is the attribution: how
much of a call was spent thinking rather than answering.
LLMResponse and TransportResult each gain a trailing reasoning_tokens
field, and the telemetry port grows from 21 to 22 columns with the new
column appended in both backends so fresh and migrated schemas keep the
same physical order.
None means this particular call did not report the field, not that the
source never reports it: a relay that falls back to a local tokenizer
replaces the whole usage object and drops completion_tokens_details.
Downstream checks must therefore read "in (None, 0)"; no provider was
observed reporting a literal zero.
Five call sites (QuotaGate entry, RetryMW/EmbeddingClient success and
transient-failure settlement) now read effective_est_tokens() instead of
est_tokens. Success paths gain an unavailable branch that keeps delta at
zero once usage frames may be missing; it has no producer yet, so
behaviour is unchanged while the tpm>0 => est_tokens>0 gate still holds.
Round 6 hit account-level rate throttling the concurrency AIMD cannot
absorb: at 26 req/min the gateway still returned 16% 429s and each one
burned a third of the retry budget. Retry-After-guided 429s now back
off without consuming attempts (gRPC pushback semantics); the retry
loop gains a per-call ceiling using the same dual-condition stall
verdict as quota-wait (local window exceeded AND no global progress).
Round 4 showed tail placement routes the third attempt to junk sources
whenever the credible alternative is gate-skipped (tight-RPM source
admitted as credible, then skipped by the limiter, falling through to
the flapping watchdog source). Demoted sources now sit between credible
and non-credible candidates.
Round 3 showed unconditional yield-after-two-failures pushes the third
attempt onto known-bad sources in heterogeneous pools (83% vs 10%
expected success). OutcomeAwareSelector now exposes health(); a failed
source only yields when some untried candidate scores at least half its
health. Health-blind selectors keep the unconditional rule.
P6 round 2 showed routing convergence turns account-level 429s into
the binding constraint (62% throttle rate at full concurrency). Each
source now carries a local AIMD limit: multiplicative cut on 429,
additive growth on success. Over-limit picks queue via the existing
quota-wait poll instead of burning retry budget or tripping the
circuit-open verdict.
RetryMW keeps a per-call failure map (local, never instance state):
a source failing twice in one call yields to the next candidate.
Attempt outcomes feed OutcomeAwareSelector behind a swallow-and-warn
guard; ResultInvalid and provider-rejected paths record success with
count_attempt=False so the breaker window stays clean. Same accounting
applied in EmbeddingClient.
Classify empty completions as transient per human ruling (fixes flaky
real-gateway smoke and prevents caching empty responses), rename the
factory injection parameter gate to breaker per the frozen design,
rewrite the probe-entry cleanup without except BaseException, declare
python-dotenv explicitly, add a mid-backoff cancellation test, and
record all implementation errata in the design and architecture docs.
Includes config aggregation for multi-source env keys, from_env and
from_settings factories with explicit shared-backend injection,
gather_bounded, top-level exports, tightened import-linter layers with
the gate removed from the Makefile, and the finalized .env.example.
iomgaa