When the streaming connection dropped AFTER user-visible text was
delivered but a tool call was in flight, we stubbed the turn with a
'⚠ Stream stalled mid tool-call; Ask me to retry' warning — costing
an iteration and breaking the flow. Users report this happening
increasingly often on long SSE streams through flaky provider routes.
Fix: in the existing inner stream-retry loop, relax the
deltas_were_sent short-circuit. If a tool call was in flight
(partial_tool_names populated) AND the error is a transient connection
error (timeout, RemoteProtocolError, SSE 'connection lost', etc.),
silently retry instead of bailing out. Fire a brief 'Connection
dropped mid tool-call; reconnecting…' marker so the user understands
the preamble is about to be re-streamed.
Researched how Claude Code (tombstone + non-streaming fallback),
OpenCode (blind Effect.retry wrapping whole stream), and Clawdbot
(4-way gate: stopReason==error + output==0 + !hadPotentialSideEffects)
handle this. Chose the narrow Clawdbot-style gate: retry only when
(a) a tool call was actually in flight (otherwise the existing
stub-with-recovered-text is correct for pure-text stalls) and
(b) the error is transient. Side-effect safety is automatic — no
tool has been dispatched within this single API call yet.
UX trade-off: user sees preamble text twice on retry (OpenCode-style).
Strictly better than a lost action with a 'retry manually' message.
If retries exhaust, falls through to the existing stub-with-warning
path so the user isn't left with zero signal.
Tests: 3 new tests in TestSilentRetryMidToolCall covering
(1) silent retry recovers tool call; (2) exhausted retries fall back
to stub; (3) text-only stalls don't trigger retry. 30/30 pass.