The same 5-day sweep of prod's journal as 5e51f87, continued. Every one of
these failed silently: no error in the UI, just a line in the log or a hole
in the database.

complete()/embed() retry a connection error before falling back.
stream_complete has always given its first chunk two attempts, but the
non-streaming path made exactly one per (server, model), and with a single
configured server (ollama.com) one ReadTimeout raised "All backends
exhausted: ReadTimeout" outright. That is the whole story of 2026-10-08,
when 27 calls died that way in a day — 23 of them memory summarisation, the
rest planning. Attempts now come from settings.llm_complete_retries (2) with
llm_retry_backoff_sec (2.0) between them; a missing model is still not
retried (a 404 is an answer, not a hiccup), and a lone server is still never
blacklisted — blacklisting it would block the next request for _TTL.

Startup waits for Postgres. create_container() opens the pool eagerly and
the retry loop for the DDL tables sits below it, so a host that comes up
before docker takes the whole lifespan with it. On 2026-10-07 15:19:40 the
agent ran `sudo reboot` on itself at the user's request ("Перезагрузи
себя"); the host booted 15:20:03, navi started at 15:20:18, hit
ConnectionRefusedError on the pool and logged "Application startup failed.
Exiting." Connection errors now retry for ~30s; a genuinely broken config
(a missing DATABASE_URL) still fails fast.

The profile loader reports its tally. A profile dropped by an unreadable
config.json is skipped by design so it cannot take the server down, but on
that same 15:20 boot four of them — modeler_3d, navi_code, secretary,
server_admin — were dropped with `Extra data: line 125 column 1`, and the
only trace was one error line each: the UI simply showed four profiles
fewer.

todo recovers a dropped `op`. Of the 3385 todo calls stored on prod, 73
arrived with the discriminator flattened away ({"index": 1, "status":
"in_progress"}, {"action": "view"}, {"": "add", "tasks": [...]}) and got a
bare "Unknown op: None" — a wasted round trip for an intent the remaining
arguments state plainly. The error message now names the five ops and what
each needs.

Message.created_at is stamped at creation. It defaulted to None and only
some construction sites filled it, so 85% of stored rows had no timestamp at
all (every tool message, 14 168 of 14 168) and no query could slice history
by time or measure a pause. Loading a row passes the column through
explicitly, so NULL rows stay NULL instead of being restamped with "now".

Every new test was checked to fail with its fix reverted. Full suite green
(1466 passed, 1 skipped). No frontend or dependency change, so the deploy is
a pull and a restart.

All three came out of a survey of the last days of journalctl on prod,
and each one silently destroyed something the user had already paid for.

memory_facts: the no-embedding INSERT bound $13 while its column list
had 12 entries, so every fact written while the embedding backend was
down died on PostgresSyntaxError and the extraction was lost — 47
embed failures in three days, most of them landing in this branch.

Embedding input now gets clipped instead of 400'd away. A 400 takes the
whole embedding with it and recall drops to ILIKE over everything; a
reaction-session prompt (a full event envelope inlined) did that 41
times. settings.embedding_max_chars (6000, 0 disables) caps the input
at the model's window, so recall still works on the head of the text.

Message strips NUL bytes at the model boundary. PostgreSQL text cannot
hold one, and a NUL arriving in a tool result (reading a binary file)
made the whole session_messages INSERT fail with
CharacterNotInRepertoireError — the turn died and the user lost it.
Three times on 2026-10-07. As a Message validator it covers every
writer downstream: session store, kv store, memory extraction.

Each new test was checked to fail with its fix reverted.