The on-demand briefing (POST /api/insights/generate) runs through the
briefing chokepoint, which named its chain walk "job" for the background
share of the day's ceiling. Since background work leaves out a provider the
health ledger benched, a person pressing "Re-run analysis" got no request at
all: the call failed with a connection refusal that never happened, and a
refused credential was never reported back.
The chain runners now take the walk apart from the budget surface: a call
can be rationed as a job and still have a person waiting on it
(interactive). runBriefingCompletion takes the flag and the on-demand
route's calls (the first pass and the grounding retry) pass it, so they keep
the job share and walk a benched provider at the tail, as background-bench
promises for interactive walks. Every other job-surface caller is a worker
or is enqueued; the status, narrative and warm routes only read and queue,
and document reads and lab scans resolve a single provider without a chain.
Refs #1279
The health ledger already counted every failed call and paused a provider
that kept failing, with a pause that grows. A paused provider only moved to
the tail of the chain, though, and the tail is still walked: a chain whose
only entry answered every call with reasoning and no answer was called by
every background job regardless.
A walk for background work (surface "job") now leaves out every provider
the ledger has benched until its window lifts; the local floor only once
it is paused, past a brief backoff. One ai.chain.background_paused line
per window says so. A person's own call still reaches the provider at the
tail and reports its own error. The ledger is in Postgres, so the bench
holds across workers and restarts.
The status, briefing and document-index paths refunded a failed call in
full, so background spend on replies without an answer never reached the
day's token ceiling. A failed chain now carries the tokens its hops
reported (tokensSpent) and those paths charge them.
The two clients share one answerless step (askAgainUnreasoned), which
keeps both inside the source size ratchet; its baselines go down.
Refs #1279
Marc-André Bombeck