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 chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex endpoint has an intermittent failure mode
where it accepts the connection but never emits a single stream event — the
socket just hangs. Direct sequential probing reproduces it (0 events, no HTTP
status), and a fresh reconnect then succeeds in ~2s. Today the only guard is
the wall-clock stale timeout in interruptible_api_call, so a dead-on-arrival
connection is held for the full stale window (90-900s depending on context /
config) before the retry loop can reconnect — minutes of wasted wall time per
stall, at a rate of ~20% of calls during affected windows.
Add a TTFB watchdog scoped to the codex_responses path:
- codex_runtime.run_codex_stream stamps agent._codex_stream_last_event_ts on
*every* stream event (not just output-text deltas), so reasoning-only and
tool-call-only turns are not mistaken for a stall.
- interruptible_api_call resets that marker before the worker starts and, while
it is still None, kills the connection once elapsed exceeds the TTFB cutoff
(default 45s, tunable via HERMES_CODEX_TTFB_TIMEOUT_SECONDS, 0 disables). The
raised TimeoutError flows through the existing retry path unchanged.
Once any event has arrived the stream is healthy and only the existing
wall-clock stale timeout applies, so legitimate long generations are never
interrupted. Gated to codex_responses; the chat_completions non-stream,
anthropic and bedrock branches have no first-event signal and are untouched.
Adds tests/agent/test_codex_ttfb_watchdog.py covering the stall kill, the
events-flowing pass-through, and the env-disable path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
