Users report that the CLI/gateway floods them with confusing retry chatter
during transient failures: a single 429 can produce 10+ "Provider/Endpoint/
Retrying in 5s..." lines before the request eventually succeeds. The same
firehose hits Telegram, Discord, Slack, etc. via _emit_status.
This patch defers all retry/fallback/compression status messages until we
know the outcome:
- if the turn ultimately succeeds (any path: primary recovers, fallback
activates, compression unsticks the request), the buffer is silently
dropped — the user sees nothing.
- if every retry and fallback exhausts and the turn fails, the buffer
is flushed at the terminal-failure return so the user sees the full
retry trace alongside the final error.
Backend logging (agent.log) is unchanged — every emission site still
writes to logger.warning/info, so post-mortem diagnosis is intact.
## What changed
run_agent.py: four new methods on AIAgent:
_buffer_status(msg) — defer an _emit_status call
_buffer_vprint(msg) — defer a _vprint(force=True) line
_clear_status_buffer() — drop pending messages on success
_flush_status_buffer() — replay pending messages on terminal failure
agent/conversation_loop.py:
- converted ~30 mid-process emit/vprint sites in the retry, fallback,
compression, empty-response, and stream-watchdog paths to the buffered
helpers
- added _flush_status_buffer() at every terminal-failure return so users
still see the trace when it actually matters
- added _clear_status_buffer() at the "non-empty assistant content"
point (NOT at "API call returned bytes" — empty responses still loop
through the empty-retry path and would otherwise lose their trace
between iterations)
- silenced the two "(´;ω;`) oops, retrying..." / "(╥_╥) error,
retrying..." spinner final-frame messages — the spinner now stops
cleanly so retries leave no visible residue
agent/chat_completion_helpers.py: same conversion for codex TTFB / stale-
stream / fallback-activation status messages.
agent/stream_diag.py: _emit_stream_drop now buffers instead of emitting
directly.
## Tests
tests/run_agent/test_retry_status_buffer.py: 7 unit tests covering
accumulate→flush, clear-on-success, mixed kinds, empty-buffer no-op,
re-buffer after flush, exception swallowing.
Updated 3 existing tests that mocked _emit_status to also mock (or use)
_buffer_status:
- tests/run_agent/test_run_agent.py::test_empty_response_emits_status_for_gateway
- tests/run_agent/test_stream_drop_logging.py (2 tests)
- tests/agent/test_codex_ttfb_watchdog.py (TTFB hint test)
## Validation
Live test: hermes chat -q against an unreachable endpoint with no fallback
exhausts retries and prints the full trace at the end. Same flow against
a working endpoint prints zero retry chatter.
The previous PR (#22993) gave us a structured WARNING per stream drop
but the only diagnostic was 'error_type=APIError error=Network
connection lost.' — same nothing the user started with. To actually
diagnose why subagents drop streams disproportionately we need to know
WHERE the drop happened.
Adds three breadcrumbs to the agent.log WARNING:
1. Inner exception chain. openai SDK wraps httpx errors as
APIConnectionError / APIError so the catch site only sees the
wrapper. _flatten_exception_chain walks __cause__/__context__ up to
4 levels deep and renders 'Outer(msg) <- Inner(msg)' so we can
tell ConnectError vs RemoteProtocolError vs ReadError vs
ProxyError without enabling verbose mode.
2. Upstream HTTP headers. Snapshots cf-ray, x-openrouter-provider,
x-openrouter-model, x-openrouter-id, x-request-id, server, via,
etc. from stream.response immediately after open (so they survive
even when the stream dies before the first chunk). These answer
'is one CF edge / one downstream provider responsible, or random?'
3. Per-attempt counters. bytes streamed, chunk count, elapsed time on
the dying attempt, and time-to-first-byte. Distinguishes 'couldn't
connect at all' (0s, 0 bytes) from 'died after 30s mid-stream'
(very different root causes — first is auth/routing, second is
upstream idle-kill or proxy timeout).
Plumbing:
- _stream_diag_init / _stream_diag_capture_response live on AIAgent
and produce a per-attempt dict held on request_client_holder['diag']
for closure access from the retry block.
- _call_chat_completions and _call_anthropic both initialize the diag
and increment counters per chunk/event (best-effort, never raises in
the streaming hot path).
- _log_stream_retry / _emit_stream_drop accept an optional diag and
render the new fields. Final-exhaustion log goes through the same
helper so it gets the same diagnostic dump.
- UI status line gains a brief 'after Xs' suffix when timing is
available — distinguishes 'connect failed' from 'died mid-stream'
at a glance without grepping logs.
Sample WARNING after this change:
Stream drop mid tool-call on attempt 2/3 — retrying.
subagent_id=sa-2-cafef00d depth=1 provider=openrouter
base_url=https://openrouter.ai/api/v1
error_type=APIError error=Connection error.
chain=APIError(Connection error.) <- RemoteProtocolError(peer
closed connection without sending complete message body)
http_status=200 bytes=12400 chunks=47 elapsed=12.00s ttfb=0.83s
upstream=[cf-ray=8f1a2b3c4d5e6f7g-LAX
x-openrouter-provider=Anthropic
x-openrouter-id=gen-abc123 server=cloudflare]
Tests: 10 covering diag init, header capture (whitelist enforced for
PII), exception-chain walking + depth cap, log content with full diag,
log content without diag (placeholders), UI elapsed-suffix on/off.
Subagent stream drops were spamming the parent terminal with two lines
per blip ('Connection dropped...' + 'Reconnected...') while leaving zero
breadcrumb in agent.log to debug them.
Two underlying bugs, fixed together:
1. quiet_mode raised the run_agent/tools/etc. loggers to ERROR, which
filters records before root-logger file handlers see them. The comment
claimed 'File handlers still capture everything' — that was wrong.
Removed in both run_agent.py and cli.py; console quietness already
comes from hermes_logging not installing a console StreamHandler in
non-verbose mode.
2. The stream-retry blocks emitted two _emit_status calls per drop
('⚠️ Connection dropped... Reconnecting...' + '🔄 Reconnected —
resuming…') with no provider name, so multi-provider sessions had to
dig through agent.log to attribute a drop. Replaced both call sites
with a single _emit_stream_drop helper that emits ONE line naming the
provider and error class, and always writes a structured WARNING to
agent.log with subagent_id, depth, provider, base_url, error_type.
Net UX change: 6 lines per triple-subagent drop → 3 lines, each
naming the provider. agent.log now has a structured breadcrumb per
retry that didn't exist before.
Tests: 6 new tests in tests/run_agent/test_stream_drop_logging.py
covering the logger-level guard, structured WARNING content, single
status line per drop (no Reconnected follow-up), and provider naming.
