A nightly sleep cycle could run for weeks emitting held-out 0.0 -> 0.0 (gate reject, zero
edits), indistinguishable from "nothing to learn", when the real cause was the codex backend
returning an error (expired auth / model unsupported on the account / outdated CLI) that got
scored as a failed rollout.
backend (CodexCliBackend):
- split _call into _call_once + a retry wrapper: transient empties/timeouts are retried
instead of silently returning "" (mirrors AzureOpenAIBackend's guard);
- on a non-zero exit, surface the reason via last_call_error and return "" rather than
leaking the CLI error text as if it were a model response;
- fail fast (no retries) on fatal auth/model/version errors (401, refresh_token_reused,
token_expired, "not supported when using Codex with a ChatGPT account",
"requires a newer version of Codex").
backend (CliBackend.reflect): retain last_reflect_raw so a no-edits night is diagnosable.
consolidate: ConsolidationResult now carries per-task held-out detail (response, hard/soft,
fail_reason) + reflect_raw + call_error.
cycle: write diagnostics.json per cycle so a 0.0 night self-explains instead of being a black box.
tests: 4 new (retry-not-silent-zero, auth-error-surfaced-not-scored, holdout-detail, reflect-raw).
Also gitignore the .skillopt-sleep/ runtime dir.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Daniel Martinez
9fcf5868c3