In-place failover covered none of the failures this deployment actually had.
gateway.canFailOver will not move a conversation that has called a tool — the
assistant turn echoing that call belongs to the provider that issued it, and a
vendor which signs its function calls rejects a follow-up carrying somebody
else's. But a rate limit lands where the request is BIGGEST, which is the
second or third model call, once the catalogue, the retrieved block, the tool
results and the whole prior conversation are being re-sent.
Every GatewayFailure in agent_runs had already called a tool. The error text
says exactly what it was:
http 429: Rate limit reached for model `openai/gpt-oss-120b` …
on tokens per minute (TPM): Limit 8000, Used 7183
So the loop starts the turn over on the next provider. No transcript is sent,
so nothing provider-specific travels and the signature problem cannot arise:
the question is simply asked again somewhere with budget left. It costs the
work already done, charged to the budget that is not exhausted.
gateway.Standby is the whole of what the runtime is told — "there is another
one, here it is". No vendor, credential or model id crosses the boundary, and
the loop still cannot name a provider.
THE RULE THAT MAKES IT SAFE: a run carrying a confirmation never restarts.
Re-running re-runs its tools; a read twice is two reads, a write twice is two
shifts assigned. I4 makes the test cheap — a write executes only against a
resolved token (Registry.gate), so a run with no confirmation cannot have
written anything, and one with a confirmation is refused without inspecting
what it did.
Once, not until the providers run out: a question worth asking twice is not
worth asking five times, and each attempt spends a real budget. A terminal
error — a rejected credential, a model this deployment cannot use — is not
retried anywhere, on the same line canFailOver already draws.
Five tests, including both refusals. Verified with teeth: disabling the restart
fails the rate-limit case.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Aravind
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