[tensornull]

Summary

The daily trusted live smoke treated one transient API connection timeout as a deterministic failure, even though the same commit passed on the previous run. This change adds one global retry budget for monitoring only: transport/timeout/connection interruptions and HTTP 408/429/5xx may consume at most one extra physical request across the three logical requests. Protocol, authentication, other 4xx, empty or incomplete responses, and schema assertions remain hard failures. The release-tag smoke explicitly keeps a zero retry budget and its original three-request limit.

The workflow and release validators now enforce the retry/request budgets, and the mocked contract covers connection timeout, stream interruption, retry exhaustion, hard authentication failure, exact request limits, and secret redaction. The reviewed CI and release documentation records the bounded behavior.

Verification

• npm ci
• npm run test:live-contract
• npm run verify
• npm run actionlint

All passed locally. npm emitted only the expected local Node 26 engine warning; the supported CI matrix remains Node 22 and 24.