fix(release-notes): retry the LLM gateway + fall back to raw commit notes

[mabry1985]

Problem

The Discord release-note step crashed when the protoLabs gateway returned a transient Cloudflare 524 (origin timeout) — callLLM got an HTML error page instead of JSON and threw, so the entire release announcement was lost (hit on @protolabsai/ui@0.35.0). One gateway blip = no Discord post, and a red run even though the publish itself succeeded.

Fix

• callLLM retries transient failures (network throws, 429, 5xx) with backoff [0, 3s, 10s] (mirrors the existing postToDiscord retry), and truncates the error body — a 524 returns a full HTML page that floods the logs.
• Fallback: if every attempt fails (or the response is empty), the caller falls back to plain commit-subject notes (buildFallbackNotes) and still posts — un-themed, but a real announcement rather than nothing.
• buildFallbackNotes extracted to lib/release-notes.mjs (the repo's pure-logic-in-lib pattern) + unit-tested.

Composes cleanly with #48's emitNotes sink (outputs / changelog / Discord all still fire on the fallback notes).

Test

biome lint clean, 69 tests (3 new for buildFallbackNotes), smoke green. Bumps 2.4.0 — publish via the Release workflow (workflow_dispatch) after merge so the action's npx @latest picks it up.

Companion: protoContent's release-packages.yml Discord step → continue-on-error (separate PR), so a gateway issue never reds the publish run.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[protoquinn]

👀 Quinn is reviewing — verdict (PASS / WARN / FAIL) + findings to follow.

[protoquinn]

QA Audit — PR #49 | fix(release-notes): retry the LLM gateway + fall back to raw commit notes

VERDICT: WARN (CI still queued; non-blocking comment — formal PASS/FAIL on re-review after CI settles)

---

CI Status

• Lint + smoke test: ⏳ queued

Diff Review

• bin/rewrite-release-notes.mjs: callLLM gains 3-attempt retry with backoff [0, 3s, 10s], transient detection (429 + 5xx → retry; other 4xx → fail fast), and truncated error bodies (300 char). The call site wraps callLLM in try/catch and falls back to buildFallbackNotes when empty or failed.
• lib/release-notes.mjs: New pure-logic module with buildFallbackNotes(version, commits) — extract + unit-test pattern.
• Composes cleanly with #48: emitNotes sink fires on all paths (LLM success, LLM empty, fallback), so Discord/changelog/output always receive notes.

Observations

• LOW: .beads/ tooling artifacts committed (beads.db-shm, beads.db-wal, issues.*.jsonl, .local_version, metadata.json) — these look like internal beads runtime state rather than source. Consider adding .beads/ (or these specific globs) to .gitignore to prevent future noise.
• LOW (Gap): clawpatch_review returned HTTP 502 — structural review unavailable for this pass. Diff-based review is complete; no cross-file issues detected from the visible diff.
• LOW (Gap): buildFallbackNotes full implementation truncated in diff summary — usage pattern (import → call with version and filteredCommits) is consistent and the function is unit-tested per the PR description.

The retry + fallback strategy is well-scoped: transient gateway failures retry gracefully, non-transient client errors fail fast, and the fallback guarantees a release announcement always lands. No correctness or safety issues identified.

— Quinn, QA Engineer

[protoquinn]

Submitted COMMENT review on #49.