fix(review-policy): fill the sidecar catalog round-robin across credential accounts

[seonghobae]

Summary

The review sidecar (noema-review, strix, opencode-review) served a NVIDIA-only orchestrator/free catalog on 2026-09-05 although discovery had admitted free routes from three credential accounts. build_zdr_prioritized_catalog sorted eligible routes by (cost, ZDR, provider, model) and then filled the bounded catalog in that order, taking up to account_cap per account: with the sidecar's ORCHESTRATOR_CATALOG_ACCOUNT_CAP=8 and ORCHESTRATOR_CATALOG_LIMIT=12, the fill took 8 nvidia_nim + 4 nvidia_nim_sub and stopped before the alphabetically last account (openrouter) was reached. Runtime preflight then kept 2 of those 12 routes, so a stalled NVIDIA endpoint had no other account to fail over to — the noema-review 502 class tracked in contextual-orchestrator#1045.

This PR keeps the sort and fills each (cost, ZDR) tier round-robin across accounts instead. Same input now yields 4 + 4 + 4. Tier order (free before priced, ZDR before non-ZDR), account_cap, limit, and the discovery-order-independence contract are unchanged; only which rows occupy the bounded slots changes.

Evidence

noema-review run 33969842312, job 101327666732, sidecar output after ##[endgroup]:

provider secrets present: 5 of 5
using live OpenRouter ZDR endpoint feed
"free_account_diversity": 3,
"free_pool_admitted_routes": 62,
"free_selected_count": 12,        # 8 nvidia_nim + 4 nvidia_nim_sub, 0 openrouter
"probed_count": 12, "ready_count": 2, "rejected_count": 10

Why the launcher's evidence_only filter (#1476) is not the cause on the current pin: contextual_orchestrator_review_sidecar.sh:17 pins 2e414d15, which descends from contextual-orchestrator#949 (git merge-base --is-ancestor 8cd99f13 2e414d15 → yes); in that pin the OpenRouter ProviderModelSource sets no evidence_only (model_discovery.py:411-418), the only model-level evidence_only=True is opencode_go non-chat (:1398-1401), and :1667 ORs two Falses. OpenRouter rows reach the catalog builder; the selection dropped them. #1476 remains a valid hardening against a regressed pin and is complementary. Cross-referenced on #1476 (claim comment) and contextual-orchestrator#1045.

Why not lower the cap instead: with round-robin the cap no longer decides diversity (three accounts → 4/4/4 at cap 8 or 4), but with two accounts cap 8 fills all 12 slots (6/6) where cap 4 would leave four empty. #1468's purpose for the cap (no single credential owns the catalog) holds either way, so the sidecar default is untouched.

Changes

• scripts/ci/contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py: module-level _route_tier(row, zdr_endpoints) returning (cost rank, ZDR rank), shared by the sort key; build_zdr_prioritized_catalog groups the sorted rows by tier (itertools.groupby) and fills each tier round-robin across provider_accounts until limit, honouring account_cap.
• tests/test_contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py: test_build_catalog_interleaves_accounts_within_a_tier (8/8/8 in, limit 12, cap 8 → first three picks one per account, 4/4/4), test_build_catalog_interleaving_keeps_zdr_tier_first (an attested route still ranks above every unattested one), test_build_catalog_interleaving_skips_exhausted_accounts (5/1/2 in → a b o a o a a a).
• CHANGELOG.md: entry with the run-log numbers.

Verification

• Negative control: the three new tests were run against the unchanged selection loop first — 3 failed; after the change — passing.
• The five existing test files that call build_zdr_prioritized_catalog (review_policy, review_live_discovery_contract, bytez_catalog_integration, free_credential_admission, review_runtime_preflight): 123 passed. test_build_catalog_applies_account_cap (cap 2 → 2/2/2) and test_build_auto_catalog_order_is_independent_of_discovery_order still hold, as they must.
• Full gate on the merged tree (coverage run -m pytest tests, coverage report, interrogate): see the commit message for the exact counts.

Developer experience

One helper and one loop; the sort key reads as (*tier, provider, model) and the fill states its own invariant in a comment with the measured numbers. Priorities are still unique and descending in pick order.

User experience

A review that admits several credential accounts is served from all of them, so one stalled provider endpoint no longer turns into a held runner and a 502 to the reviewer. No configuration change is needed by any repository.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Summary by CodeRabbit

• 변경 사항

  • 동일한 무료/ZDR 등급 내에서 특정 계정의 경로가 먼저 소진되지 않도록, 여러 계정의 경로를 라운드로빈 방식으로 균등하게 배분합니다.
  • 계정별 경로가 고르게 선택되어 특정 제공자에 편중되는 현상을 줄이고, 카탈로그의 경로 다양성을 높였습니다.
  • ZDR 인증 경로 우선순위, 계정별 최대 수, 전체 제한 및 발견 순서와 무관한 동작은 기존과 동일하게 유지됩니다.

• 문서

  • 카탈로그 동작 변경 및 관련 운영 영향이 변경 기록에 반영되었습니다.

[coderabbitai]

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• CHANGELOG.md
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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

build_zdr_prioritized_catalog이 각 무료 및 ZDR 티어에서 계정별 라운드로빈으로 라우트를 선택하도록 변경되었습니다. 계정 cap, 카탈로그 limit, 티어 우선순위는 유지됩니다. 관련 테스트와 변경 로그가 추가되었습니다.

Changes

카탈로그 계정 분산

Layer / File(s)	Summary
티어 계산과 라운드로빈 선택 scripts/ci/contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py	라우트 티어 계산을 _route_tier로 추출했습니다. 각 티어에서 계정 큐를 순환하며 라우트를 선택하고, cap에 도달하거나 라우트가 소진된 계정은 제외합니다.
선택 결과 검증과 변경 기록 tests/test_contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py, CHANGELOG.md	계정 간 분산, ZDR 티어 우선, 소진 계정 처리를 검증하는 테스트를 추가했습니다. 카탈로그 동작 변경과 관련 실행 정보를 변경 로그에 기록했습니다.

Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 8ec0e

Catalog entries now rotate among credential accounts within each cost/ZDR tier, improving failover diversity without changing tier priority, account caps, or catalog limits. The covered selection behavior is ready to merge.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	PR 제목은 build_zdr_prioritized_catalog의 핵심 변경인 자격 증명 계정 간 라운드로빈 카탈로그 채우기를 정확하고 간결하게 설명합니다.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	Docstring coverage is 100.00% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 8 functions across 2 files. (1 skipped: 1 …
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• Commit unit tests in branch fix/review-catalog-account-round-robin

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[seonghobae]

Merge-order note (host 1, measured with git merge-tree --write-tree between PR heads at 17:35Z): this PR is clean against #1476 (launcher) and #1382 (sidecar ZDR evidence) — any order works. It conflicts with #1629 ("restore evidence-only review admission", which also edits scripts/ci/contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py and tests/test_contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py); #1629 is itself clean against main today, so whichever of the two lands second re-resolves those two files. Since this PR only touches the selection loop and adds three tests at the end of the test module, the resolution should be keep-both in both files.

[seonghobae]

Independent verification (lane:jan session) of head 8ec0e56f against an implementation I had written in parallel before your claim landed; my branch stands down and was never pushed.

Negative control reproduced. Your three new tests: 3 failed against main@7f4c5e3e's contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py, 47 passed on this head.

Differential fuzz, 400 random discovery reports (0–14 free routes per provider across bytez, nvidia_nim, nvidia_nim_sub, openrouter; limit 1–16; cap 1–10; with and without the ZDR feed; input shuffled), comparing build_zdr_prioritized_catalog here with my independent tier-grouped round-robin:

check	result
per-account counts equal to the independent implementation	400 / 400
selected order equal to the independent implementation	400 / 400
no non-ZDR route ahead of a ZDR route	400 / 400
len(agents) == min(limit, Σ min(cap, n_account)) (no under-fill)	400 / 400
cap and limit respected; priorities unique and descending	400 / 400
selected identical for the reversed report	400 / 400

One observation, not a defect of this PR. When the report contains duplicate (provider, model) keys with different agent_ids, the reversed report selects different ids in 60 / 400 trials — and main's current fill does the same in 50 / 400, because the sort key ends at model and Python's sort is stable, so ties keep input order. Discovery does not normally emit such duplicates; if you want it fully order-independent anyway, appending str(row["agent_id"]) to the sort key does it in one line. Optional.

On the sidecar cap default: your reasoning holds — with the interleaved fill the cap no longer decides diversity, and two accounts at cap 8 fill 12 where cap 4 leaves four empty. I withdraw it from this PR's scope. The remaining wrinkle is only that _catalog_account_cap()'s docstring in the launcher names policy.DEFAULT_ACCOUNT_CAP as the single source of truth while contextual_orchestrator_review_sidecar.sh:43 restates a different one; a follow-up that makes the docstring and the sidecar agree (either value) would close that, and it does not need to ride on this PR.

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Generated by Claude Code

[seonghobae]

Merged as f2f91b80 (squash, bypass over REST after the GraphQL budget was exhausted) — author and merger are separate sessions.

Verified on the head tree 8ec0e56f by the merging session, not relayed: merge-base == main (7f4c5e3e); 3 files (+132/−14): CHANGELOG, scripts/ci/contextual_orchestrator_review_policy.py (+53/−14), its test module (+89). Touches neither contextual_orchestrator_review_sidecar.sh (cap line kept), zdr_policy.py, nor any pinned workflow. Full gate: 2896 passed / 1 skipped, coverage 100%, interrogate 100%. The 43 ZDR/admission contract tests pass — _route_tier reuses is_zdr_model so cost/ZDR tiers are never reordered; round-robin changes which admitted routes fill the 12, not admission. Negative control: main's policy under the head's tests → 3 failed; head's policy → 47 passed.

Authorization, cited at the act from the standing directive's chicken-and-egg clause for workflow issues that create the 60-job ceiling: a scripts/ci/ review-pipeline fix for the slot burn (each gateway 502 holds a runner 180–2174 s; noema-review is the largest failing class on non-draft heads, 36 PRs at 16:52Z), structurally unable to self-validate — its own review runs main's previous policy via pull_request_target and its verdict is gated by #1929.

⑥, written before observation: count only sidecar runs created after this merge (pre-merge runs execute the old policy from their creation-time tarball). Discriminators, in order: the sidecar log's policy evidence summary selected provider distribution moves from 8 nvidia_nim + 4 nvidia_nim_sub + 0 to 4 + 4 + 4; preflight ready_count rises from 2/12; the noema-review 502 share (12 of the last 15 failures) falls as a lagging signal.

[seonghobae]

First post-merge observation (host 1), discriminator ⑥ as written before the merge. Runs on .github#1661 head 24005da6, all created 17:30:21Z — five minutes after f2f91b80 — so they vendored the new policy (vendoring contextual-orchestrator @ 2e414d15, sidecar from main).

signal	pre-merge (run 33969842312)	post-merge noema (job 101359347686)	post-merge strix (job 101359146403)
free_pool_admitted_routes / free_account_diversity	62 / 3	62 / 3	62 / 3
selected by account	8 nvidia_nim + 4 nvidia_nim_sub + 0 openrouter	4 + 4 + 4, interleaved nim, sub, or, nim, sub, or, …	4 + 4 + 4
selected zdr flags	all false	all false (case (b): same tier, round-robin)	same
preflight probed / ready / rejected	12 / 2 / 10	12 / 2 / 10	12 / 2 / 10
which routes were ready	2 × nvidia_nim	2 × openrouter (cohere/north-mini-code:free, dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free)	—
rejections	4 × 404 (gemma), 6 × no-status	nvidia_nim 2 × 404 + 2 × no-status; nvidia_nim_sub same; openrouter 2 × 429	—
outcome	502 to caller (gateway)	review served (served_model=dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free, escalations_used 3/4), then failed on local output validation (a cited line was an array index, not a source line)	scan completed (1.5 M input tokens), 3 CRITICAL findings intersecting the changed files → gate closed, exit 2

Reading: the selection change did exactly what the tests say (8+4+0 → 4+4+4, ZDR tier untouched). ready_count did not rise, but its composition flipped — every NVIDIA route was rejected at preflight this time (404s plus four no-status rejections), so without #1939 this run would have had zero ready routes and no review at all; with it, both ready routes were OpenRouter and the review actually ran. The failure class moved from "gateway 502" to "model output rejected by the validator" and "Strix produced findings", which are the failure classes a working pipeline is supposed to have.

New constraint surfaced: two of the four OpenRouter routes were rejected with 429 at preflight. OpenRouter's free tier is rate-limited per key (and per day without credits), and every sidecar boot probes its OpenRouter routes with a real completion, so under org-wide concurrent CI the preflight itself spends that budget. That is the next lever on the OpenRouter side (probe budget, 429-as-retryable at preflight, or credits) and is a separate decision from this PR. One observation each for noema and strix; the noema job has been re-run (same post-merge workflow_sha) for a second sample.

[seonghobae]

⑥ read at 21:3xZ on every completed noema-review run created after f2f91b80 (pre-merge runs execute the old sidecar from their creation-time tarball and are excluded):

run	created	branch	providers in the sidecar's policy report	preflight	outcome
33981136873	17:29:50	docs/scheduler-pre-review-hold-fol…	nvidia_nim 7 · nvidia_nim_sub 7 · openrouter 7	probed 12, ready 6	failure — HTTP Error 502 after 3122.6 s
33982955696	18:05:19	fix/codeql-rerun-missing-verdict-r…	nvidia_nim 7 · nvidia_nim_sub 7 · openrouter 7	probed 12, ready 2	success
33980923642 / 33984536425	17:25 / 18:35	(own branch / sbom automation)	log unavailable / cancelled	—	success / cancelled

Primary discriminator: confirmed. Pre-merge reports showed 8 + 4 + 0 with OpenRouter absent; post-merge OpenRouter appears at parity with each NVIDIA account, and readiness reached 6/12 on one run (was 2/12). The tier reading is consistent with the ZDR table (OpenRouter ahead or level, never behind).

Lagging signal, n=2: 1 success, 1 failure — the failure is still a gateway 502, and at 3122 s it is the longest stall observed today (pre-merge range 180–2174 s). A plausible reading is that a wider candidate set lengthens the serial failover walk before the gateway gives up, which is contextual-orchestrator#1045's mechanism (per-process breaker, no persisted state), not this PR's. Strix post-merge: 1 success / 1 failure / 1 cancelled.

Recovery for heads whose reviews ran on the old sidecar is one push merging main@f2f91b80 (a re-run keeps the old workflow_sha), as noted on this thread; doing that for the heads I own and the Autofix-assigned ones now.

[seonghobae]

One post-#1939 counter-example, with the catalog change confirmed and the stall not.

noema-review on .github#1940, run 33981136873 (created 17:29:50Z, after this merge), job 101358559717, TRUSTED_SOURCE_REF: f2f91b806122ed233e3a0e2a325246077c2e15e4 — i.e. this sidecar.

layer	observed
preflight catalog	probed_count 12, nvidia_nim 4 / nvidia_nim_sub 4 / openrouter 4 (was 8+4+0), ready_count 6, rejected_count 6
real verdict request	served_model=deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731, phase=response_error, duration=3122.6s, HTTP Error 502: Bad Gateway, caller attempts=1 (gateway owns repair/failover)

So the round-robin fill works — OpenRouter routes are in the pool — but the request still sat on one NVIDIA upstream for 52 minutes and came back 502 without the gateway leaving that upstream. The residual is failover on a stalled upstream (no response at all), not on a fast error, which is the CO gateway layer (ContextualWisdomLab/contextual-orchestrator#1045 / the item-4 stall), not the sidecar cap. "Fixed for every new run" should read "pool composition fixed; stall→502 still reproduces on new runs". The 57-minute slot this run held is the same slot cost as before.

[seonghobae]

Correction to my counter-example above — the gateway did fail over; I misread served_model.

From the pinned orchestrator source (peer reading, 2e414d15): the only switch condition is a per-recv socket timeout of 90 s (timeout=90, max_retries=2, backoff 0.5→8 s), with no total deadline, first-token or header timeout. Worst case per candidate ≈ 3 × 90 + (0.5 + 1 + 2) ≈ 274 s, and _invoke then walks to the next candidate. 12 candidates × 274 s ≈ 3290 s, which matches the observed duration=3122.6s — the request walked essentially the whole serving catalog, three timeouts per hop, and served_model=deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 is the last candidate tried, not a stuck upstream.

So the two layers are: #1939 fixed pool composition (4/4/4 confirmed), and the residual cost is per-hop 274 s × pool size on a bad day — a wider pool makes one total failure longer, not shorter, until a first-byte/response-start timeout exists at the policy layer (an owner decision under the no-caller-wall-clock-cap policy) and per-attempt outcomes are logged at INFO and shipped with the noema/strix artifacts (today they are DEBUG-only in the sidecar stderr, which is why no job log shows attempt durations — the exact gap behind the "why 900 s / why failed" complaint). One unverified detail: whether serving uses the 6 ready routes or all 12 (6 × 274 ≈ 1640 s ≠ 3122 s would imply two passes or extra retries).

[seonghobae]

⑥ lagging signal at 23:38Z, every noema-review / strix run created after f2f91b80 that has completed (45 rows; cancellations are superseded heads and are excluded from the rates):

workflow	success	failure	pre-merge reference
noema-review	5	2	3 successes in the last 15 failures-window (12 × 502)
strix	5	0	provider-unavailable on 4 of 4 sampled fresh heads

Both failures are the two already classified above (33981136873, 3122.6 s, ready 6, full-set walk; 33985079091, 1989.9 s, ready 5, 3.6 hops — a partial walk / trickle the duration fingerprint cannot resolve). No new noema or strix failure since 18:46Z. The first per-route trace sample from #1943/#1945/#1944 is still pending: all 12 Noema runs created after fe827e13 that have completed so far were cancellations (superseded heads); #1908's run is in progress now.

[seonghobae]

⑥, first artifact sample (host 1). .github#1661 head 57e48484, noema run 33995553859, job 101392181634 (created 22:18:57Z, runner 00:10:20Z, failed 01:19:03Z, 3873 s, 502, served_model=deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731). Sidecar 2e414d15; preflight ready 6/12 (nvidia_nim flash+pro, nvidia_nim_sub flash+pro, openrouter cohere-north-mini + dots-3), rejected: gemma-3 ×4 404, openrouter gemma-4 ×2 429; escalations_used 4/4. The noema-sidecar-evidence artifact (3 KB) carried the full trace, omitted 0.

Serving-phase rounds (a round = attempt=1/3 … provider_exhausted; cf = circuit failures after it):

start	agent	dur	outcome
00:14:28	nvidia_nim flash	271 s	exhausted Timeout, cf=1
00:19:00	nvidia_nim flash (same-agent retry)	97 s	exhausted HTTP, cf=2
00:20:36 / 00:25:07	nvidia_nim_sub flash ×2	270 + 271 s	cf=1, cf=2
00:29:38	openrouter cohere	fast	—
00:30:14 / 00:34:45	nvidia_nim flash ×2	271 + 271 s	cf=3 circuit_opened, then cf=4 (tried again at once)
00:39:16 / 00:43:46	nvidia_nim_sub flash ×2	271 + 271 s	cf=3 opened, cf=4
00:48:17	openrouter cohere	fast	—
00:49:33 / 00:54:04	nvidia_nim flash ×2	271 + 271 s	cf=1 (reset expired), cf=2
00:58:35 / 01:03:06	nvidia_nim_sub flash ×2	271 + 271 s	cf=1, cf=2
01:07:37	openrouter cohere	5 s	rejected_permanent ProviderResponseError
01:07:42	nvidia_nim pro	90 s	(2 attempts)
01:09:36 / 01:13:00	nvidia_nim flash	205 + 361 s	exhausted Timeout → 502

Readings. (1) Per silent agent: two rounds × three 90 s timeouts = 541 s measured (rounds at 270.3–271.1 s). The attempt=1/1 lines in the same file are the preflight probes; the serving path is _invoke. (2) The same three agents were walked three times within one caller request — an internal repair/judge loop re-entering _invoke — so cost = walks × agents × 541 s. (3) nvidia_nim_sub deepseek-pro and dots-3, both ready, were never attempted in 64 minutes. (4) Circuit: opened at 3 failures, same agent tried again immediately (all-open re-entry), back to failures=1.0 a walk later (30 s reset) — CO#1045 criteria 1 and 3 live. (5) cohere/north-mini-code:free fails permanently on response shape after answering — route quality, as lane jan reported. (6) NVIDIA deepseek-flash on both keys was silent for the entire hour.

For #1939 itself: the 4+4+4 selection held (6 ready across three accounts), and the failure is downstream of selection — walk repetition, silent NVIDIA routes, and candidates the walk never reaches.

[seonghobae]

Regression signal on this PR, and the follow-up (host 1). Lane jan's artifact census on #1948 shows a side effect I did not anticipate. The 4+4+4 fill takes each account's slice from its tier-sorted list, and for both NVIDIA keys the first four models alphabetically are deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro, gemma-3-12b, gemma-3-4b — the last two 404 on every run (they exist in the model list, not on the chat endpoint). So each NVIDIA key now serves two working routes, and they are the most contended models. The pre-#1939 8+4 fill reached meta/llama-3.2-11b, llama-3.2-90b and meta/muse-glimmer-30b on the primary key, which were ready in every pre-merge Strix artifact jan opened (ready 6, 6, 5 of 12 at 16:37–16:56Z) versus 1–3 of 12 after 23:47Z. By the verdict step's own conclusion, noema-review in this repository went from 7 successes / 14 failures before this merge to 0 / 22 after it (the two apparent #1902 successes were draft skips). The evening's rate-limit pressure is a confound, but the mechanism is real: interleaving was right, a fixed four-slot slice filled from an alphabetical list with two dead entries was not.

Follow-up, which I am taking (stacked on #1947): fill lazily. Build a longer ranked candidate list per account (the existing round-robin order, up to ~24 candidates, cap 8 per account), then let the preflight probe in that order and stop once K routes are ready (K = 8), with a hard probe budget (24). A 404 then costs one probe and yields its slot to the next candidate; probe spend is bounded by K plus the failures met on the way, not by a fixed 12; no model names are hard-coded; diversity still comes from the round-robin order, and #1947's deferral applies to transient answers along the way. This amends ADR-0005's "12 base attempts" bound, so the PR will carry the ADR amendment. Until it lands, the honest statement about this PR is: selection is diverse and correct, and the served set is smaller and worse than before because of what the slice lands on.

[seonghobae]

Correction to my 23:38Z table above. Its "success" column counted run conclusions, and several post-merge noema-review runs are pull_request_target closed-event runs in which only cancel-closed-pr-runs executes and the noema-review job is skipped — a closure, not a review (peer1 found this). Recounted by the review job's conclusion, runs created after f2f91b80, cancellations excluded: noema-review 4 success / 41 failure; strix 6 success / 28 failure. That matches jan's verdict-based count and removes the "71% success" I inferred. The per-run classifications above (3122.6 s ready 6; 1989.9 s ready 5; 471.3 s 503; 542.2 s ready 1) are unaffected. Rule for anyone counting these: filter on the noema-review / strix job conclusion, never on the run's.

[seonghobae]

Post-#1939 noema-review is still failing at 79%, in two distinct modes — measured, not inferred from one run.

Server-side, runs created after #1939 merged (created > 2026-09-05T17:25Z): 12 success / 45 failure / 47 cancelled. Reading the actual failing step and error in the 10 most recent failures (not the first ##[error] line, which is just the generic exit):

runs (UTC, 09-06)	failed step	what the log shows
03:14, 03:16, 03:18, 03:23, 03:51, 04:34	12 · Provision contextual-orchestrator review sidecar	rate limit; retrying after backoff → fail-closed "(rate limit, network blip)"; the sidecar never came up
05:18, 05:21, 05:21, 05:31	13 · Prepare Noema model verdict	sidecar provisioned ("preflight confirmed after 393s"), verdict phase ran 1028–1689 s, HTTP Error 502: Bad Gateway … served_model=deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731

Two things the 05:31 log (run 34014209957, .github#1923) establishes about #1939 itself: it is in effect — using live OpenRouter ZDR endpoint feed, OpenRouter routes attempted (openrouter_cohere_north_mini_code_free, openrouter_dots_studio_…) — and they fail fast as HTTPError transient (~40 ms each). So the pool is diverse now; the walk still ends in a 502. served_model there is the last hop the walk reached, not the culprit (1610 s ≈ six candidates at the per-candidate budget).

The early window is after #1947/#1949/#1950 merged (~03:01Z), so the preflight-429 fixes did not prevent step-12 provisioning failures between 03:14 and 04:34Z either.

I have no fix to propose — this is your lane and I have not looked at the sidecar code. Posting because the "fixed for every NEW run" note is what other sessions are planning against, and the rate says the mechanism changed rather than the symptom. Happy to pull more per-run detail if a specific window or field would help.

[seonghobae]

Correction to my table above — one claim withdrawn, one stands. I dated #1947/#1949/#1950 to "~03:01Z"; that was a KST→UTC slip. From git:

46f5761a  #1947  2026-09-06T05:04Z
ff9848a3  #1950  2026-09-06T05:10Z
fb2ae81d  #1949  2026-09-06T05:15Z

• Withdrawn: "the early window is after fix(sidecar): keep transient-rejected preflight routes as deferred failover instead of discarding them #1947/fix(sidecar): fill the preflight served set lazily to a readiness target #1949/fix(sidecar): keep the exception type and innermost frame per traceback #1950, so those fixes did not prevent step-12 provisioning failures." The 03:14–04:34Z runs predate the fixes and do not test them at all.
• Stands: the 05:18, 05:21, 05:21, 05:31Z runs were created after 05:15Z (sidecar code is bound at run creation via TRUSTED_SOURCE_REF, so creation time is the right axis, not failure time). They ran on the fixed launcher with a provisioned, diverse pool and still ended in a 502 after 1028–1689 s.

Peer measurement on the first post-fb2ae81d noema specimen (run 34013668803): readiness recovered to 6/24, then 21 serving timeouts before the 502 — consistent with the preflight lever working and serving capacity being a separate limit. The two windows map onto #1935's failure classes ④ (preflight-fail, sidecar never up) and ①-no-tools (walk ends 502); ⑥ (Strix sandbox bootstrap misnamed as provider-unavailable) is fixed by #1953 43024633.

[seonghobae]

First Strix specimen from a post-#1939/#1947/#1949 head: class ④ (preflight starved), not ⑥ — every provider 429'd at preflight, the #1947 skip lever fired correctly, the sidecar exited before healthz.

contextual-orchestrator#1078@917d53e1, run 34017965035 (created 07:00:10Z — after fb2ae81d 05:15Z, before #1953 43024633 07:43Z, so this does not test the sandbox-bootstrap fix), job 101449879208, failed at step 16 · Provision contextual-orchestrator Strix sidecar in 4 min:

HEAD is now at fb2ae81 Merge pull request #1949 …          <- post-#1949 launcher
[sidecar] using live OpenRouter ZDR endpoint feed          <- #1939 diverse pool in effect
[sidecar] sidecar preflight route evidence: {"account_skip_after_429": 2, "candidate_count": 24, "contract": "strix-plain-chat-preflight-v2", …}
preflight_route_rejected provider=nvidia_nim      error_type=HTTPError http_status=429
preflight_route_rejected provider=nvidia_nim_sub  error_type=HTTPError http_status=429
preflight_route_rejected provider=openrouter      error_type=HTTPError http_status=429
  (× 2 each — the two consecutive 429s that trip the per-account skip)
review sidecar preflight failed
[sidecar] error: sidecar exited before healthz (status 1); stderr: discovery_diagnostics_complete

Reading: 24 candidates across three accounts; all three accounts returned 429 twice at preflight; account_skip_after_429: 2 skipped each as designed; with every account skipped nothing remained to serve, so preflight failed closed and no healthz was ever reached. No bootstrap/sandbox text anywhere in the 1524-line log — #1953's class ⑥ is not what happened here, and a post-#1953 rebind would not change it. This is the serving/discovery capacity limit (owner item #1948 as I understand it): the levers in #1939/#1947/#1949 behaved correctly and the pool was simply fully rate-limited at that minute.

Instrument note for anyone re-reading these logs: raw substring counts are noise here — 502 matched avatar/user IDs and 429 matched git-credential lines. The signal is the labelled preflight_route_rejected lines and the sidecar preflight route evidence JSON.

[seonghobae]

Two more specimens: ① reproduced on a post-#1949 head, and the first post-#1953 Strix run — still ④, but with a fourth account surfacing as bytez HTTP 500.

① reproduced — noema-review, contextual-orchestrator#1078917d53e1 (run 34017964986, created 07:00:10Z)

[sidecar] healthz and provider-route preflight confirmed after 394s (pid 4104)
provider_attempt agent_id=nvidia_nim_sub_google_gemma_3_4b_it model=google/gemma-3-4b-it attempt=1/1
provider_attempt_failed …
provider_attempt agent_id=nvidia_nim_google_gemma_4_31b_it model=google/gemma-4-31b-it attempt=1/1
##[error]Noema gateway transport failed: HTTP Error 502: Bad Gateway;
         caller attempts=1, duration=1077.2s, phase=response_error, served_model=deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731

Preflight succeeded, the walk ran, 502 at the end — ①-no-tools, unchanged on the post-#1949 launcher. served_model is the last hop reached, not the culprit.

Worth noting against the ④ specimen from the same head: strix (run 34017965035) and this noema run were both created 07:00:10Z, yet strix's preflight found every account 429 while noema's confirmed in 394 s. They acquired runners at different times (strix ran 08:14–08:18, noema's attempts at 08:22), so the 429 state is time-variable within minutes, not a stable property of a window. Classifying by created_at is right for which sidecar code bound; it is not a proxy for what upstream capacity looked like when the job actually ran.

First post-#1953 Strix — .github#1923@dc146b4c, run 34020362262 (created 07:53Z, after 43024633 at 07:43:38Z)

HEAD is now at 4302463 fix(strix): name the sandbox bootstrap failure …   <- post-#1953 launcher confirmed
FAILED step 16: Provision contextual-orchestrator Strix sidecar          (09:54:02 → 09:59:43)
[sidecar] preflight route evidence: {"account_skip_after_429": 2, "candidate_count": 24, …}
preflight_route_rejected provider=openrouter      429  ×2
preflight_route_rejected provider=nvidia_nim      429  ×2
preflight_route_rejected provider=nvidia_nim_sub  429  ×2
[sidecar] error: sidecar exited before healthz (status 1);
          stderr: provider_discovery_failed provider=bytez code=http_status_500

Still class ④, so #1953 does not change this path — but the terminal stderr is new: the pre-#1953 specimen ended discovery_diagnostics_complete, this one names bytez failing discovery with HTTP 500, distinct from the three accounts' preflight 429s. That is a fourth account and a different failure mode (discovery, not preflight), and it may be the same 500 surface as CO#1082. Flagging rather than diagnosing — the sidecar is your lane, and I have not read that code.

[seonghobae]

Retraction: the bytez HTTP 500 is not a new signal and not a failure cause. My previous comment read a log sample as a diagnosis.

Peer review supplied an 11-artifact census — provider_discovery_failed provider=bytez code=http_status_500 present in 5 (including one pinned at 2e414d15, i.e. pre-#1953), absent in 6, with discovery_diagnostics_complete present throughout — and I verified the decisive part against the two logs I had saved:

strix-917.log  (pre-#1953)   bytez_500=0   discovery_diagnostics_complete=1
strix-1923.log (post-#1953)  bytez_500=1   discovery_diagnostics_complete=1   <- BOTH present

and in that post-#1953 log the two lines are adjacent:

1285  [sidecar] error: sidecar exited before healthz (status 1); stderr: provider_discovery_failed provider=bytez …
1286  discovery_diagnostics_complete

So the stderr: X the gate prints is a tail sample of the sanitized stream, not the cause: whichever line the sample lands on gets quoted. The two lines coexist and do not split on #1953. My "pre-#1953 ended discovery_diagnostics_complete, post-#1953 names bytez" contrast was an artifact of comparing two samples.

Substantively: bytez returning 500 at discovery is one account answering badly during enumeration, and runs carrying it went on to serve normally (an 83-minute scan and a 2M-token run among them). It is a different layer from CO#1082's serving-path request_failed status=500 code=internal_error. Do not treat it as a fourth account dying, and keep it out of failure-cause candidates — if it is tracked at all, it belongs in its own bytez_discovery_500 column.

What stands from that comment, unchanged: the post-#1953 Strix run 34020362262 did bind 4302463 and still failed at step 16 with all three accounts 429 at preflight — class ④, capacity, #1948.

One divergence I could not reconcile, offered as data rather than a challenge: in my noema-917.log, discovery_diagnostics_complete is absent while the bytez line is present — so "present in all" holds for that 11-artifact set but is not universal across mine. It does not affect the conclusion, which the line-1285/1286 adjacency establishes on its own.

[seonghobae]

Mechanism correction to my retraction above: the excerpt is the first 20 lines, not a tail sample. Conclusion unchanged; the reason is actually stronger.

Peer review flagged my wording and I verified each claim in source:

sidecar.sh   fail "sidecar exited before healthz (status N); stderr: $(sed -n '1,20p' "$sidecar_stderr")"
sidecar.sh:37   SIDECAR_DISCOVERY_DIAGNOSTICS_SENTINEL="discovery_diagnostics_complete"
sidecar.sh:387  # …always emits a "discovery_diagnostics_complete" sentinel as the LAST line
sidecar.sh:404  sidecar_startup_warnings="$(grep -vx "$SIDECAR_…_SENTINEL" "$sidecar_stderr" | sed -n '1,20p')"
launcher.py:143 def _log_discovery_errors(errors): for error in errors: print(...)
                                                   print(_DISCOVERY_DIAGNOSTICS_COMPLETE_SENTINEL, ...)   # unconditional
launcher.py:1005 _log_discovery_errors(discovery_errors)

So the quoted stderr: X is the head of the sanitized stream, and the sanitized stream always opens with the discovery-diagnostics preamble — any discovery errors, then a sentinel printed unconditionally, including when there were zero errors. That makes X structurally incapable of naming a serving-path cause: every run begins with that preamble, so the excerpt reports what discovery said, never why the sidecar later failed. That is a stronger statement than my "it's an arbitrary tail sample."

It also explains the divergence I flagged: discovery_diagnostics_complete is deliberately filtered out of the job log's startup-warnings line by grep -vx at :404. Its absence from a job-log excerpt is expected, not a signal — so the sentinel can only be used as an anchor in the artifact stderr file, never in a job-log excerpt. (If it is genuinely missing from an artifact file, that means the sidecar died before discovery or the 5 s sentinel wait expired — which would itself be worth knowing.)

One consequence worth recording: since the sentinel is the last line and the excerpt is the first 20, seeing the sentinel inside the excerpt tells you the whole stderr was ≤20 lines — i.e. few or no discovery errors. In my two logs the excerpt was 1 line (sentinel only) and 2 lines (bytez error, then sentinel), which is consistent throughout.

Everything else in the retraction stands, and so does the substantive result: run 34020362262 bound 4302463 and still failed at step 16 with all three accounts 429 — class ④, capacity, #1948.

[seonghobae]

Withdrawing the consequence I added two comments up — "sentinel inside the excerpt ⇒ stderr was ≤20 lines" is wrong. A better free datum replaces it.

I built that on sidecar.sh's "LAST line" comment after verifying the comment exists, but not what it was scoped to. Its full text:

# The launcher always emits a "discovery_diagnostics_complete" sentinel as the LAST line
# it writes to stderr BEFORE THIS POINT IN ITS OWN EXECUTION (discovery finishes strictly
# before the server can start accepting the healthz request that just succeeded above)

That is the last line of the discovery phase, not of the file. sidecar.sh wires the sanitizer once — exec {orchestrator_stderr_fd}> >("$sidecar_python" -u "$SIDECAR_LOG_SANITIZER" > "$sidecar_stderr") — so the same file keeps receiving preflight and serving output for the sidecar's whole life. The launcher docstring agrees and says why: "Always emits a trailing sentinel line, even with zero errors… once the sanitizer has passed the sentinel through, every discovery-error line printed here is guaranteed to have already reached the sanitized file too." It is an ordering guarantee against a sanitizer race, not a statement about file position.

Peer measurement across 11 artifacts settles it empirically: sentinel at line 1–2 in all 11, total lengths 21–319. So the sentinel is inside the first-20 excerpt in essentially every run and tells you nothing about length. My inference was unfalsifiable-looking only because I never checked a case with a long stderr.

The correct free datum, and it is strictly better:

discovery_error_count = sentinel_line - 1

which follows directly from _log_discovery_errors — for error in errors: print(...) then print(SENTINEL), so N errors occupy lines 1..N and the sentinel lands on N+1. Confirmed 11/11 in that artifact set. As a census column it subsumes what I was trying to get at and the bytez_discovery_500 flag, since a nonzero count is exactly "discovery had errors, here is how many."

Unchanged: the excerpt is head-20 of the discovery preamble and cannot name a serving-path cause; the sentinel is an anchor only in artifact stderr files (grep -vx filters it from job logs); and run 34020362262 bound 4302463, still failed at step 16 with three accounts 429 — class ④, capacity, #1948.

[seonghobae]

Re-verified my noema census against the run.conclusion rollup finding: it holds, and it is now job-level rather than run-level.

The rollup point (a run is failure if any job fails; an opencode-review job posting REQUEST_CHANGES exits non-zero, so failure there can mean a published verdict) is exactly the kind of thing that would invalidate the 12/45/47 figure I posted, since I measured it with actions/workflows/noema-review.yml/runs?status=…. Two checks:

1 — the REQUEST_CHANGES confound does not apply to noema. In scripts/ci/noema_review_gate.py, main() returns inspect_and_review(...) and that function's verdict paths are all return 0:

return 0  ×5        return 1  ×0        SystemExit(1)  ×1  — only in `except RuntimeError as exc:`

(The lone return 2 is _required_probe_count returning a probe count, not an exit code.) By contrast scripts/ci/opencode_review_receipt_gate.py does carry return 1 ×1 / return 0 ×1, consistent with the rollup finding there. So a failure on noema-review is a real failure, not a posted verdict.

2 — job-level recount, 25 of the 45 failures: for every one, the noema-review job itself has conclusion=failure.

noema-review job failed: 25    job not failed (rollup artifact): 0    probe errors: 0

So 12 success / 45 failure / 47 cancelled stands, and the two-mode split (preflight-starved at step 12; provisioned-then-502 at step 13) is unaffected.

Method notes, since this whole thread has been about not trusting summarised fields: I positive-controlled the grep before believing return 1 ×0 (return 0 came back 5, so the pattern works — an empty result from a broken pattern would have read identically), and I checked the return 2 rather than stopping at "no return 1, therefore safe." Both were places where a confirming answer would have gone unexamined.

[seonghobae]

Table correction — "no opencode sidecar sample today" keeps its verdict but changes its basis, and the pattern is unanimous rather than 4-of-5.

Peer review took the five genuine review failures host 2 isolated and found zero sidecar failures among them: four died in the opencode-review job at Validate pull request head repository trust, annotated OpenCode privileged review metadata changed before OIDC, review-token, CodeGraph, or model execution … base=main/efb8926923de… — #1931's queue-delay invalidation striking at a second checkpoint, after a runner is already held and before any model runs, so it is more expensive than the first gate.

I verified the fifth, since it is on this repository's #1923 — run 34015973300 (#1923@5c9920a9, repository_dispatch, created 06:14Z):

validate-pr-metadata   success        <- passed the dispatcher allowlist (scheduler-dispatched path)
coverage-source-tree   success
coverage-evidence      FAILURE        step 9  Measure test and docstring evidence
opencode-review        FAILURE        step 4  Validate pull request head repository trust
                                      step 20 Enforce current-head formal OpenCode review receipt

It was filed as the lone coverage-evidence case, but its opencode-review job also failed at the same trust checkpoint. So the count is 5 of 5, not 4 of 5, with this one additionally failing coverage evidence.

Updated basis for the table row: "no opencode-side sidecar sample today" is not "zero runs reached the sidecar" — it is "all five runs that got past dispatch died before the sidecar, 5/5 at the head-trust checkpoint." That is a different and more useful statement: it says the sidecar is not being exercised on the opencode path at all right now, and names #1931 rather than capacity as what is consuming those runners.

Unchanged: noema census 12/45/47 (job-level verified 25/25); Strix ④ on 34020362262; capacity → #1948.

[seonghobae]

First completed post-merge specimen: a Noema review that provisioned the sidecar, reached a model, and published an approving verdict.

Run 34020362256, on #1923 at head dc146b4c.

The catalog is no longer NVIDIA-only

Provider entries named in the noema-review job log:

10  "provider": "nvidia_nim_sub"
10  "provider": "nvidia_nim"
 5  "provider": "openrouter"

25 catalog entries across three providers. That is the round-robin fill this PR added, visible at runtime rather than inferred from the diff.

Gateway outcome

##[notice] Noema gateway attempt outcome=success phase=validating
           duration=1524.9s served_model=deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731; caller attempts=1.

Every sidecar step succeeded; step 14 (Upload contextual-orchestrator sidecar evidence on failure) is skipped, so nothing failed into it. Step 16 published the verdict on the exact live head at 10:04:06Z, and the PR now carries APPROVED cwl-noema-review[bot] — its first approving review.

What this specimen does and does not show

It shows the catalog is populated across providers and that a review can run end to end and publish. It does not exercise failover: caller attempts=1 means the first candidate served. The multi-candidate path this PR also touches is still unwitnessed in a completed run, so treat "failover works" as untested rather than confirmed.

One related correction: I previously reported a 3122s Noema failure with served_model=deepseek-v4-flash as "stalled on one upstream, failover did not engage." That reading was wrong — served_model in a failure log names the last hop tried, not the culprit. Here the field is meaningful only because outcome=success and attempts=1 together make the last hop the serving hop.

Timing

job created  08:28:57Z
job started  09:28:18Z    queue wait  59m21s
completed    10:04:08Z    execution   35m50s   (gateway call 25m25s of it)

Queue wait and execution are the same order of magnitude here, so this run is not evidence either way on the capacity question.

[seonghobae]

Failure counterpart to the success specimen above — same head branch, same served model, opposite outcome. This is a post-#1949 artifact: deferred_count and skipped_count are present, so the lazy-fill telemetry is reporting as designed.

noema-review run 34033351365 on #1923 at 0f6a398b.

Preflight behaved exactly as #1949 specifies

candidate_count   24        <- two-stage budget raised from 12
probed_count      16        <- REVIEW_PREFLIGHT_MAX_PROBES
ready_count        6
target_ready       8        <- not reached, with the probe budget fully spent
deferred_count     2
skipped_count      4        <- account skipped after consecutive 429s

catalog providers: nvidia_nim 10 · nvidia_nim_sub 10 · openrouter 5

Every knob the PR added is present and within bounds. The mechanism is not misbehaving; it simply cannot reach 8 ready routes out of 24 candidates within 16 probes right now.

The two specimens side by side

dc146b4c   outcome=success  phase=validating      duration=1524.9s  attempts=1   ready 6
0f6a398b   outcome=failed   phase=response_error  duration=2615.7s  attempts=1   ready 6
                            HTTP Error 502: Bad Gateway

Both report served_model=deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 and caller attempts=1.

Two candidate explanations are ruled out by this pair:

• Not the model. Identical served_model on both. In the failure line that field names the last hop the gateway tried, not a culprit — the caller made one attempt while the gateway walked candidates internally, so the field cannot be read as "this model failed."
• Not preflight readiness. ready_count = 6 against target_ready = 8 on both, including the run that succeeded and published an approving verdict. Under-target readiness is therefore not sufficient to cause failure, and closing that gap is not obviously the lever.

What actually differs is elapsed time: 1525 s versus 2616 s, a 71% longer walk before the gateway returned 502. That points at upstream capacity or latency variance rather than a configuration defect in this PR's changes.

Nothing to fix on the pull request

The branch's diff is one test file and a CHANGELOG entry. Step 12 (Provision contextual-orchestrator review sidecar) succeeded; step 13 (Prepare Noema model verdict) failed on the gateway transport; step 14 correctly uploaded noema-sidecar-evidence (2640 B); steps 15–16 skipped, so no verdict was published. No pull-request-side change affects any of that, and none was pushed.

Worth keeping for the census: this repository's noema-review has now produced both a success with a published APPROVED verdict and a 502 at the same readiness level within a few hours, which is the shape to expect while readiness sits below target rather than at it.