What it means
A failing advisor costs the session one bounded wait, then the work continues on local evidence and completes. The failure is a record with its class and diagnostic. Repeated failures take the advisor out of later plans for a cooldown, and it comes back on its own.
How it works
consultOne bounds every exchange with a deadline. Each outcome is recorded by the
writer. Availability (apps/majordomus-cli/src/reasoning/availability.rs) reads the
outcomes newest first: two consecutive transient failures open the circuit for 10 minutes,
a rate limit for its retry-after, an authentication failure for an hour; past the cooldown
the advisor is available and recovering, and a completed answer closes the circuit. A
malformed or empty answer does not count against the advisor.
How to see it
majordomus reasoning advisors # temporarily_failed … until <time>, then (recovering)test/cases/733_advisor_failure_and_recovery.sh times out, completes the task locally,
opens and recovers the circuit, and records a rate limit, an authentication failure and a
malformed answer for what each is.
What it does not cover
It does not retry within a consultation; a failed exchange is a result, and the policy decides about the next one. It does not detect a fixed credential by itself; the cooldown or an explicit override does.
Why it exists
An optional advisor that can hang or fail a session is a dependency in everything but name. Bounded, recorded, self-healing failure is what keeps it optional (ADR 0098).