Run 103d180b

The evidence makes the blocker even more clear. The r5 wave at 10:53–10:55 UTC lost pods across multiple experiments simultaneously, and exp #333's r5 attempt on account=personal (the fallback after team failures) also lost its pods. This is no longer a team-account-specific event — both team and personal accounts are affected within the same window.

Goal

Diagnose why direct-dispatch r5 for experiment #192 failed in the same fleet-wide pattern as r4, and produce a blocker that prevents further compute burn until the underlying RunPod-side or account-level event is identified by the human owner.

Hypothesis

Pods are being terminated by an out-of-band actor (RunPod-side reclaim, billing/auth event affecting the API key, or manual sweep) within ~60–90 seconds of reporting RUNNING, across multiple experiments and across both team and personal accounts. The r5 attempt for #192 is one of at least four simultaneously affected dispatches in the 10:53–10:55 UTC window.

Prediction

If I re-dispatch the same A100 r5 spec right now, the new pod will:

1. Report RUNNING within ~40s of dispatch,
2. Disappear from whichever account it was billed to within ~60s after that,
3. Trigger an r6 auto-recovery with an identical "Pod … not found in account=…" failure reason,
4. Burn another ~$1.50–3 of A100 time for ~90s of effectively-no-work compute.

There is no per-experiment code change that would prevent this. The r4 plan_json correctly noted the EPS script fix (22739aab) and bootstrap hardening (pod-bootstrap.ts:230-264) were already in place; r5 confirms those did not cause and cannot fix the failure.

Kill Criterion

This recovery run is itself the kill criterion: I am stopping with a blocker rather than emitting a runpod-spec. The criterion that would unblock re-dispatch is one of:

• The owner identifies a specific RunPod-side cause (billing cap, API key rotation, manual sweep, regional capacity reclaim) and confirms it has cleared, OR
• The owner observes ≥1 unrelated control dispatch (e.g. exp #363, #366, #333 r6) running successfully past the ~2-minute mark in the same window.

Experimental Setup

No new compute. Evidence-collection only, captured here:

r4 wave (10:39–10:45 UTC, team account): 4 sibling A100 dispatches; 3 vanished from account=team within ~3 minutes (per prior plan_json analysis on this experiment).

r5 wave (10:53–10:55 UTC, both accounts): at least four experiments lost pods simultaneously:

run	exp	pod	account	RUNNING at	lost at	gap
3d8f3042… (this)	#192	v0c7bx292xqvg4	team	10:53:54	10:54:55	~61s
6e8a0593…	#363	m1ayhl6nsbxw04	team	10:53:54	10:54:54	~60s
9e039246…	#366	lqpfpmbytlgded	team	10:44:53	10:54:54	(long-running, killed in same window)
32e93989…	#333	j0xvy1q82ryo8m, cv13x9s487tvwn	personal	10:53:55	10:54:54	~60s

The exp #333 row is decisive: that recovery had deliberately switched from team to personal because r1–r4 had already failed on team, and personal also lost both of its pods in the same ~60s window. This rules out the team-only hypothesis from the r4 diagnosis.

Compute and Hardware

No compute dispatched. The Approval Checklist below explicitly does not approve a runpod-spec. If re-approved later, the canonical shape from the existing experiment record (1× A100 80GB SXM, single pod, ~3h estimated, ~$4.50 at the $1.49/GPU-hr SXM rate plus negligible storage) remains valid — no plan edit is required, only resolution of the account-level event.

Artifacts

This blocker plan is the only artifact. No models, datasets, evals, or figures will be produced by this run.

Verification

The owner can verify the diagnosis without my access by:

1. Opening the RunPod console for both the team and personal accounts and inspecting the audit/event log for 2026-05-14 10:53–10:55 UTC. Look for podTerminate, billing alerts, API-key revocations, or capacity-reclaim notices.
2. Cross-referencing the four pod IDs above (v0c7bx292xqvg4, m1ayhl6nsbxw04, lqpfpmbytlgded, j0xvy1q82ryo8m, cv13x9s487tvwn) — if a single RunPod-side action terminated them, the audit log will likely group them.
3. Checking whether the same window shows successful (non-reaped) dispatches from other Sagan experiments; e.g. exp #365 pod j18eiux6ccekyj was reported as status=running in the r4 diagnosis — if it is now also gone, the event is platform-wide rather than account-wide.

Risks and Red Team

• Risk of unnecessary blocker. If the platform event has already cleared, I am wasting time by not re-dispatching. Mitigation: this run does not edit the plan_md or pod_spec on experiments.b50b82c2…, so re-approval is one click for the owner once they confirm the account is healthy.
• Risk of misdiagnosis. I have not directly queried the RunPod API for these pods' termination reasons (no MCP tool calls to RunPod in this thread, and the prior plan_json correctly noted that out-of-band action is the most likely explanation). Mitigation: the cross-account, multi-experiment, sub-90-second pattern is too tight to be explained by anything in our codepath; the wrapper's sleep infinity (pod-bootstrap.ts:230-264) makes a script-side exit impossible to manifest as "not found in account".
• Risk of compounding loss. If I had re-dispatched, the next failure would have produced an r6 recovery that would itself recurse — the four parallel recovery runs already running at 10:57 UTC show the loop is in flight; emitting another spec accelerates it.

Critique loop notes. This is a recovery-context blocker, not a fresh adversarial plan, so the bounded 3-loop paired-critic workflow is not applicable. The prior plan_json (r4 analysis) already passed adversarial review and explicitly recommended not re-dispatching; r5's failure is the strongest possible confirmation of that recommendation. No critique loops run; no Codex fallback; no folded follow-ups.

Likely Clean Result

No clean result will be produced by this run. When the underlying event is resolved and the experiment eventually completes, the clean result for #192 (a separate future write-up) will answer "Can capability be taught through another persona?" using the persona-spread pipeline at branch exp-192-persona-spread@22739aab. That is unchanged by this recovery.

Approval Checklist

• Goal — diagnose r5 failure, produce blocker, do not dispatch. Matches recovery prompt's "stop with a concise blocker" branch.
• Hypothesis — cross-account out-of-band pod termination, not script bug.
• Prediction — re-dispatch would fail the same way within ~90s.
• Kill criterion — blocker; unblocking requires owner-side RunPod console inspection.
• Compute/hardware/USD — no compute approved; no USD spend by this run.
• Artifacts — this plan only.
• Verification — RunPod console audit logs (team + personal) for 2026-05-14 10:53–10:55 UTC.
• Risks — covered above; cross-account evidence rules out the team-only hypothesis from r4.
• Likely clean-result shape — unchanged from prior approved plan; not produced by this run.
• Runpod-spec matches plan — no runpod-spec emitted, by design. Per the system prompt: "If the experiment truly should not launch compute, do not use kind=experiment; write a blocker…". The original kind=experiment dispatch is preserved by simply not emitting a fenced runpod-spec block, which the runner treats as a blocker.

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Exact next manual action (owner):

1. Open the RunPod console for the team account → Events/Audit log for 2026-05-14 10:53–10:55 UTC. Look for grouped podTerminate events covering v0c7bx292xqvg4, m1ayhl6nsbxw04, lqpfpmbytlgded.
2. Open the RunPod console for the personal account → same window. Look for the termination of j0xvy1q82ryo8m and cv13x9s487tvwn. If both accounts show the same termination cause, the issue is RunPod-side (open a support ticket with these five pod IDs). If they show different causes, treat the team and personal events separately.
3. Check billing/usage caps on both accounts for the day — a hard cap hit at the team level could explain the team failures, but does not explain the personal-account failure unless that account is also near a cap.
4. Once the cause is identified and confirmed cleared, re-approve experiments.b50b82c2-eefe-4d8a-924f-9ac776084b97 as-is. No plan_md, pod_spec, or branch change is needed.

[TEXTBOX:runpod-team-audit-summary]

[TEXTBOX:runpod-personal-audit-summary]

[TEXTBOX:owner-decision-redispatch-or-hold]