The gate check forced operators to guess a per-call token size before
they could enable the TPM gate at all; est_tokens is now an optional
tuning override and effective_est_tokens() derives the reservation from
the provider quota. Reservation and settlement already read the same
derived value, so the deposit still nets to zero on both the success
path and the non-dead transient failure path.
The rest of _validate_gates is untouched, and the est_tokens field plus
its EST_TOKENS env key stay put for migration compatibility.
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 5 left three residual failure classes; ladder exhaustion (3.2%
of structured calls with a single re-ask) and 429 leakage (5.8%, AIMD
oscillating above the sustainable point) are addressable: re-ask
default goes 1 to 2 (conservative vs instructor's 3) and the AIMD cut
factor drops to 0.5.
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.