Theodore LiandClaude Opus 4.8 aed44024d4 fix(tables): surface real error causes on cell-execution failures (diagnostics) (#4868)
* fix(tables): retry transient DB/Redis failures in cell execution and surface error causes

Workflow-group-cell runs intermittently failed on trivial DB reads/writes
under heavy fan-out, stranding cells in `running`. Investigation showed the
PlanetScale and ElastiCache backends were healthy at the time — the failures
are transient connection-level faults that the cell (maxAttempts: 1) had no
tolerance for, and the real cause was never logged (Drizzle wraps it as
"Failed query: ..." and the driver cause lives in error.cause).

Resilience:
- Add retryTransient (lib/table/retry-transient.ts): retries only transient
  infra errors (reuses isRetryableInfrastructureError; adds an ioredis
  command-timeout match) with jittered backoff, then rethrows. Fail-fast for
  everything else.
- Wrap the cell's getTableById/getRowById reads, the terminal write
  (cell-write updateRow — idempotent via the executionId guard), and the
  Redis cascade-lock acquire.

Diagnostics:
- Add describeError (lib/core/errors/retryable-infrastructure.ts): walks the
  .cause chain and always returns the underlying driver cause (code/errno/
  syscall + causeChain), including for unclassified errors like AbortError.
- Log `cause` + a `retryable` flag (and aborted/timedOut in the cell's main
  catch) across the cell + finalization error paths, mirroring the existing
  schedule-execution pattern. Logging-only; no behavior change. This lets the
  next recurrence reveal the real cause and whether the retry applies.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(tables): address review feedback on cell retry resilience

- retryTransient: re-check the abort signal after the backoff sleep so a
  cancellation during sleep stops the next attempt (don't run/return work for
  an already-cancelled task).
- isRetryableRedisError: walk the .cause chain (mirroring the infra
  classifier) so wrapped Redis timeouts are recognized; drop "Connection is in
  subscriber mode" — that's a connection-state programming error, not a
  transient drop, and would just fail identically every retry.
- cascade-lock: stop wrapping acquireLock in retryTransient. acquireLock is a
  non-idempotent SET NX, so retrying after a timed-out-but-applied first SET
  returns false (key already ours) and yields a false `contended` that skips
  the cascade. A transient Redis blip here just fails the run before pickup
  (no stranded cell); the dispatcher re-drives it.
- Tests: cause-chain Redis match, subscriber-mode exclusion, abort-during-sleep.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(tables): drop out-of-scope abort/timeout fields from cell catch

The main catch logged `aborted`/`timedOut` from `abortSignal`/`timeoutController`,
but those are declared inside the outer try block (the inner try around
executeWorkflow is try/finally, so this catch belongs to the outer try) and are
not in scope in the catch — `next build`'s type-check failed with "Cannot find
name 'abortSignal'". Local incremental `tsc --noEmit` had skipped the file and
falsely passed; the Cursor/Greptile reviewers flagged this correctly.

Removed the two fields. Abort/timeout is still surfaced via `cause:
describeError(err)` (an aborted run shows `name: 'AbortError'` / the timeout
message), so no diagnostic signal is lost.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

* refactor(tables): drop in-process retry, keep cause diagnostics only

In-process retry is the wrong layer for this path: the cell task is
maxAttempts:1 by design, retrying on a possibly-degraded worker may not help,
and it masks the very transient-failure signal we're trying to capture before
we understand the root cause. Removed retryTransient entirely (file + all
wrapping in cell-write, the cascade reads, and the lock acquire) and kept only
the diagnostic logging.

- Deleted lib/table/retry-transient.ts (+ test); cell-write and the cascade
  reads call getTableById/getRowById/updateRow directly again, fail-fast.
- Kept describeError + `cause`/`retryable` fields across the cell + finalization
  catch blocks; the cell-path `retryable` flag now sources from
  isRetryableInfrastructureError (the canonical classifier) for consistency.

Diagnostics-first: surface the real driver cause on the next recurrence, then
decide the actual fix (e.g. task-level maxAttempts, or addressing the worker-
side cause) from evidence rather than a speculative in-process retry.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(schedules): log error cause on scheduled-execution failure paths

The scheduled-job failure paths logged the raw error (.message/stack only) —
its `.cause` (the real driver error behind a Drizzle "Failed query: ..."
wrapper) was never recorded, and the classified-only
`describeRetryableInfrastructureError` returns undefined for unrecognized
errors. A real failed run (same incident window as the cell failures) failed in
`applyScheduleUpdate` with exactly this unrecorded cause.

Added `cause: describeError(error)` (always-on, walks the cause chain) to the
applyScheduleUpdate catch, the early-failure catch, and the unhandled-error
catch — passed as a second arg so the existing message+stack still emit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

* refactor(errors): move describeError to @sim/utils/errors

`describeError` is a general-purpose error/cause-chain helper — it didn't
belong in `lib/core/errors/retryable-infrastructure.ts` (that module is
specifically about classifying retryable infra errors, and the name read wrong
for a generic diagnostic). Moved it to `@sim/utils/errors` alongside `toError`/
`getErrorMessage`/`getPostgresErrorCode`, with its own cycle-safe cause walk.

- Added describeError + DescribedError + tests to packages/utils/src/errors.ts.
- Reverted the describeError addition from retryable-infrastructure.ts (it keeps
  only isRetryableInfrastructureError / describeRetryableInfrastructureError,
  which are accurately named and still used by the schedule retry path).
- Re-pointed all consumers (cell, logging-session, pause-persistence, schedule)
  to import describeError from @sim/utils/errors. The `retryable` classification
  flag still sources from isRetryableInfrastructureError where used.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

---------

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-06-03 17:57:06 -04:00

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