fix(agent): halt on typed tool billing blockers

[dlkakbs]

• Follow-up to #20691 and the review here:
#20691 (comment)

The previous version tried to halt on billing blockers by matching generic tool-result text like "Payment Required" / "Insufficient credits". That could false-positive on unrelated tool output.

This follow-up moves billing-blocker detection to the layers that actually see the provider response, and only halts on an explicit typed signal emitted from there.

What changed

• Added a structured tool-result signal for terminal billing blockers.
• Updated web_tools.py to emit that signal only when the backend exception carries an unambiguous HTTP 402.
• Updated browser backend wrappers to do the same during session creation:
  • Firecrawl browser provider
  • Browser Use provider
  • Browserbase provider
• Updated run_agent to halt only on the typed billing-blocker signal instead of substring-matching arbitrary tool output.

Behavioral notes

• Plain tool output that merely contains 402 Payment Required text no longer triggers a halt.
• Recoverable Browserbase 402s remain recoverable:
  • if dropping keepAlive / proxies lets session creation succeed, no blocker is emitted
  • only terminal 402s become typed billing blockers
• Terminal browser-provider billing blockers are no longer hidden behind local fallback.

Targeted verification

• typed 402 from web tools halts
• plain error text mentioning 402 does not halt
• terminal browser-provider 402 does not fall back to local
• browser navigate surfaces the typed blocker result
• recoverable Browserbase 402 still succeeds

[teknium1]

Thanks for narrowing the proposal to typed provider signals. The underlying issue still exists on current main: tools/browser_tool.py:2050-2079 catches provider failures and falls back to local Chromium, while default guardrails do not hard-stop (agent/tool_guardrails.py:73, :241-244).

Problems

• The changed execution bodies no longer exist on current main: commit 79559214a moved them into agent/tool_executor.py; current post-result handling is at agent/tool_executor.py:852-857 and :1517-1522.
• The changed tools/browser_providers/* modules were removed by the browser-provider plugin migration. Current implementations are plugins/browser/*/provider.py; e.g. terminal Browserbase failure remains a generic RuntimeError at plugins/browser/browserbase/provider.py:187-191.
• Current web providers may return failure envelopes rather than raise. plugins/web/tavily/provider.py:172-176 catches HTTP errors into {success: false, error: ...}, so an outer exception handler in tools/web_tools.py would not classify that case.

Suggested changes

• Port the signal consumer to both current executor paths and define/employ the signal through the current browser/web provider contracts. Preserve Browserbase's paid-feature retry sequence before terminal classification, and cover envelope-returning web failures.

Automated hermes-sweeper review.

[GottZ]

This was generated by AI during triage.

Summary

Two PRs address tools wasting iterations after terminal provider billing failures. #20691 detects billing phrases in generic results, while #21253 replaces that broad matching with explicit provider-originated HTTP 402 signals consumed by the runtime.

Related pull requests

• #20691 [closed] related — (+144/-0) — closed as a rejected precursor, still relevant because #21253 supersedes its approach: its generic result-string matching can halt on logs, fixtures, search snippets, or quoted errors and introduces an always-on stop that bypasses the opt-in hard-stop policy, as documented in the blocking contributor review.
• #21253 related — (+484/-5) — keep open with a salvage path, consistent with the hermes-sweeper keep_open review: the typed non-retryable HTTP 402 signal, plain-text false-positive test, and Browserbase retry-before-terminal-classification directly address #20691's defects. The patch must be rebased and ported from removed browser-provider modules and pre-79559214a runtime bodies to both current agent/tool_executor.py result paths and the plugins/browser and plugins/web provider contracts, including failure-envelope handling.

Duplicates

#21253 supersedes #20691 for the same billing-blocker issue, but they are not implementation duplicates: #20691 uses unsafe generic substring matching, whereas #21253 uses typed provider signals.

Suggested consolidation

Keep #21253 open with a salvage path rather than reviving #20691. Building on the automated keep-open verdict, preserve #21253's structured billing signal, false-positive protection, and terminal-only Browserbase classification, but require the author to rebase and move the producer and consumer changes onto the current executor and plugin contracts; #20691 should remain closed as the superseded, contributor-blocked implementation.

Cross-PR triage: Reviewed 2 pull requests and 0 issues in this complex. Each diff was read against this issue; Assessment working set: 38 kB of PR diffs, 4 kB of issue/PR text, 2 kB of discussion (1 comments), 0 verify verdicts. verdicts reflect diff content, not PR titles. Part of an automated triage batch.