Evidence record / gemini-cli
A dated record of one change, kept so the writing that cites it can be checked. Compiled from the sources listed below by the research run, not written for reading. The judgment lives in the issues that cite it, below.
2026-08-17-gemini-cli-capacity-exhaustion-errors-became-terminal-in-stable-v0-55-1-retries
Capacity-exhaustion errors became terminal in stable v0.55.1; retries and a recovery TTL exist only on main.
PR #28599 then #28716 (commit 2139b121bc028e0b4c96b97385555b19c2dd629d, merged 2026-08-07T01:17Z, first stable v0.55.1 on 2026-08-11) reclassified MODEL_CAPACITY_EXHAUSTED / MODEL_CAPACITY_EXCEEDED, INSUFFICIENT_G1_CREDITS_BALANCE, and 429/499/503 responses with capacity-shaped messages as TerminalQuotaError -- no backoff even when the server supplies a retry delay, immediate model fallback instead. Issue #28761, filed 2026-08-10 against 0.54.4, reports the user-facing shape: repeated 'Usage limit reached for gemini-3.5-flash' while the CLI's own /model usage display shows 1-8% consumed. PR #28790 (commit fa2f27aee0464412e4ac455a4221b01a775ff9bc, merged 2026-08-13T18:20Z) calls this a 'critical capacity exhaustion retry regression' and restores graduated behaviour: unattended/non-interactive runs translate capacity errors back to ordinary retryable errors with exponential backoff (default 10 attempts) and never prompt for fallback; interactive runs get 2 silent jittered backoffs (1s, 3s) before the fallback dialog; and ModelAvailabilityService stamps markedAt and clears a capacity-terminal mark after a 30-second sliding TTL so a model is not dead for the whole session. Harder 'quota' reasons stay permanently terminal.
Channel: main-unreleased. Ancestry: The regression half is in stable: git tag --contains 2139b121b -> v0.55.1 (also d55e366f6 -> v0.55.1). The fix half is not: git tag --contains fa2f27aee returns empty. Confirmed at file level -- git show v0.55.1:packages/core/src/availability/modelAvailabilityService.ts | grep markedAt returns nothing, while the same file at e120d041e defines markedAt and the 30s sliding TTL.
Operator consequence: Hold at v0.54.x, or accept the behaviour, if you run gemini-cli unattended. On the current stable (v0.55.1, npm latest as of 2026-08-17) a single transient capacity blip terminates rather than backs off, silently downgrades you to a fallback model, and marks the preferred model unavailable for the rest of the session with no recovery path -- which in CI reads as a hard failure or a quality regression you cannot attribute. The fix has been on main since 2026-08-13 and is in no tag; watch for the next stable and re-test your unattended runs against it before trusting retry semantics again.
Receipt
Finding metadata
Run: 2026-08-17-weekly-digest-2026-08-10_2026-08-17-frontier-v0
Finding ID: 2026-08-17-gemini-cli-capacity-exhaustion-errors-became-terminal-in-stable-v0-55-1-retries
Source links
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Versioned source: run artifact