The retry ran on the sweep's own 10s tick for a 30-minute window, so a phase
whose judge was unreachable re-judged up to 180 times. A verdict is not one
request either: `evaluator` is agentic and loops up to `MAX_TOOL_CALLS + 1`
rounds, resending the whole growing history each time, against evidence the
code's own comment sizes at ~120 KB. One unjudgeable phase could therefore
issue on the order of 2,000 model requests.
That is most of why the z.ai weekly plan kept emptying with no mission having
visibly done anything expensive — twice now, 2026-08-29 and 2026-09-09. Nothing
recorded it, because `usage_events` carries no provider or model column.
Two changes:
Read the error before retrying. z.ai answers an exhausted plan with a 429
carrying code 1310 and its own reset timestamp. Retrying that is arithmetic,
not optimism: the reset was two days out and the phase spent its whole window
asking anyway. It now fails immediately and says which problem this is —
"the judge provider's plan limit is exhausted until 2026-09-11 10:01:33" sends
you to the plan, where "the independent validator could not be reached" sent
you into the mission. The classifier is deliberately conservative; anything
that does not positively identify itself as an exhausted plan stays retryable,
because giving up on a transport blip costs a phase that did nothing wrong —
which is how mission 01a011bf lost its script phase.
Back off. Waiting as long as we have already waited doubles total elapsed per
attempt, so the schedule is exponential with no attempt counter to store:
10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 300, 300 … — about ten attempts in the same window instead
of a hundred and eighty. `judge_retry_after` holds the clock and the sweep's
SELECT honours it; a landed verdict clears it alongside `judge_blocked_since`.
Verified rather than asserted: the migration applies and rolls back against a
real postgres, and replacing the backoff with the old fixed tick makes
`the_backoff_is_exponential_and_capped` fail (181 attempts, not ~10).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WZb5A2kfVfjpdwSochkuHz
