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chore: remove silent exception swallowing (fail-loudly debt)

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
python
Domain
ai, frontend, tooling

Research direction

Start with CLAUDE.md and the listed handlers in agents/base/memory.py, agents/base/agent.py, agents/tools/file_io_tools.py, ui/_chat_helpers.py, and ui/routers/system.py; review related issue #3289. Trace which failures are silently swallowed, then verify behavior-relevant sites no longer hide errors and a lint test rejects new silent broad handlers while allowing documented existing locations.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement p2

Several hundred broad except Exception handlers remain, and a meaningful share silently discard the error — the pattern CLAUDE.md's fail-loudly rule calls out. Some hide real behaviour: memory ranking silently stops adapting, the "model loaded at wrong ctx" check silently turns off, and every Agent UI streaming failure becomes a bare "try again" with no cause or correlation id.

Next step: fix the behaviour-relevant sites first, then add a lint guard with an allowlist of what's left.

🔍 Technical details

Highest-value sites:

  • agents/base/memory.py:1466 (failed update_confidence swallowed), :2022 (vectors dropped)
  • agents/base/agent.py:4927 (ctx-size probe error → False)
  • agents/tools/file_io_tools.py:725 (search_code skips files)
  • ui/_chat_helpers.py:2787-2796 (streaming failure → generic message; failed persist swallowed); also :93, :1672, :2250, :2821
  • ui/routers/system.py:606 (catalog failure leaves model_downloaded wrong)

Counts: agents/base 47 swallowing sites (19 in system_context.py); src/gaia/ui 26 of 141 broad handlers only pass/continue/return a constant; llm+installer 108 broad (21 swallow); rag 40, eval 37, audio 33, cli 64, hub 16.

Guard: a lint test failing on new silent broad handlers, allowlisting existing ones by location. Related: #3289.

Found in a review of main @ 64544f218.

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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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