Category C: Hard timeout and retry for failed reviewer agents #408

Parent: #405

Problem

Reviewer agents that hit API overload or connection issues silently return with 0 tool uses after several minutes, consuming wall time and producing nothing. The parent workflow then has to manually mark the review as passed or retry, adding another round-trip.

Evidence

From session logs (sansari-terminal-may12.txt):

⏺ deepwork:reviewer(Review finder_analysis step output in parent workflow)
  ⎿  Done (0 tool uses · 0 tokens · 3m 46s)

⏺ deepwork:reviewer(Review finder_analysis step output in parent workflow)
  ⎿  Done (0 tool uses · 0 tokens · 3m 56s)

Both calls to the same reviewer returned 0 tool uses after ~4 minutes each — a strong signal of API timeout or rate limiting. Combined waste: ~8 minutes for a step that was eventually bypassed anyway.

Proposed fix

Two changes:

1. Hard timeout on reviewer agents. If a reviewer agent completes with 0 tool uses and non-zero elapsed time (indicating it started but did nothing), treat it as a failure rather than a pass. Log a warning and retry once with exponential backoff.

2. Max retry cap with skip-and-log. After one retry, if the reviewer still returns 0 tool uses, skip the review for this step and log: "reviewer skipped after 2 failed attempts — manual review recommended". Do not block the workflow indefinitely on API issues.

3. Fast-fail on 0 tool uses. If the reviewer returns 0 tool uses within the first 30 seconds, it likely never got a response at all. Retry immediately rather than waiting the full elapsed time.

Quality preservation

• Reviewer still runs on first attempt as today.
• One retry is attempted before skipping.
• Skips are logged and surfaced to the user so they can manually review if the step is high-stakes.
• The skip does not mark the step as "passed" — it marks it as "reviewer unavailable, unverified."