The quality-first default (OpenAI image via OpenRouter) is slow, and a full
hatch fans out ~8 rows with up to 3 retries each (300s/call) across 2 parallel
waves, so the absolute backend worst case is ~30 min. The old ceilings fired
mid-run:
- per-image HTTP call: 180s -> 300s (a single cold row can exceed 3 min)
- drafts RPC: 240s -> 420s (single wave, no retries — 7 min is ample)
- hatch RPC: 420s -> 1hr (sits above the ~30 min backend worst case)
The hatch ceiling is intentionally well above the realistic max so the frontend
never throws "request timed out" before the backend has exhausted its own
retries. The background-resumable notification path remains the real UX safety
net — the user can close the modal and get pinged on completion.
OpenRouter/Nous image gen now runs a quality-first model chain by default:
attempt the highest-fidelity OpenAI image model first, then fall back to
Gemini 3 Pro Image when it's access-gated/unavailable/times out. An explicit
OPENROUTER_IMAGE_MODEL / config model override pins one model with no fallback.
Atlas validation rejects malformed model output instead of shipping it: adds a
per-state collapse guard (a single sliver/fragment row no longer passes because
other rows are healthy), on top of the existing postage-stamp + multi-pose
checks.
Desktop: pet-gen native notifications are now "global" (not tied to a chat
session), so a background generation started from the command center fires an
OS notification when the user is away even with no active session. Adds a
neutral "This can take up to 5 minutes." banner on step 1, and lets the
provider picker auto-size.
Tests updated/added for the OpenRouter fallback chain, the collapse guard, and
the global notification path.
Reference-grounded image provider over the OpenRouter-compatible
chat-completions image protocol (Gemini Flash Image et al.). Nous Portal
proxies OpenRouter, so one provider serves both — giving pet generation a
reference-capable backend beyond OpenAI gpt-image.
