[Pepps233]

Summary

Reconcile legacy skill-candidate work and make synthesis retries follow durable error classification. Deterministic schema, artifact, and input failures now become terminal immediately, transient provider and transport failures retain bounded retries by synthesis identity across source jobs, and later qualified candidates continue through validation and evaluation.

Reasoning

Candidate synthesis previously counted retries against the source evolution job and ignored EvolutionExecutionError.retryable. Deterministic failures were retried three times, while the same synthesis identity could receive a fresh retry budget from a later job.

Legacy exhausted synthesis and completed candidate work awaiting evaluation could also remain stranded after startup. Persisting the synthesis idempotency key with failure diagnostics allows retries to follow the immutable synthesis identity, while explicit terminal reason codes distinguish non-retryable failures from exhausted transient attempts.

Changes

• Reconcile legacy exhausted synthesis and completed candidate work that still requires evaluation handling.
• Stop synthesis immediately for classified non-retryable schema, artifact, and input failures.
• Retry only classified transient provider and transport failures.
• Persist synthesis idempotency keys in failure diagnostics and count attempts across source evolution jobs.
• Record distinct terminal reasons for non-retryable failures and exhausted transient attempts.
• Continue processing later qualified candidate groups when another group cannot be retried.
• Preserve the existing bounded backoff and legacy recovery behavior.
• Add reusable provider-error message classification for thrown transport failures.
• Cover deterministic termination, transient retries, cross-job identity accounting, legacy recovery, and persistence round trips.
• Update recovery and package changelog documentation. No dependency changes.

Testing

• npm run check
• cd packages/ai && node ../../node_modules/vitest/dist/cli.js --run test/retry.test.ts (18 passed)
• cd packages/coding-agent && node ../../node_modules/vitest/dist/cli.js --run test/evolution-runtime.test.ts (32 passed)
• cd packages/evolution && node ../../node_modules/vitest/dist/cli.js --run test/skill-candidate-worker.test.ts test/skill-candidate-registry.test.ts test/filesystem-store.test.ts (33 passed)
• ./test.sh attempted: all evolution tests passed, while the aggregate run failed in two existing test/suite/agent-session-harness-version.test.ts assertions that expect skill content digests instead of package versions. The same two failures reproduce unchanged on base commit a139c8972090e55002d84f9d8e0c702213cecfb6.