formatter: linter-guided retry to suppress GPT-5 reasoning drift
GPT-5 is a reasoning model and is not bit-deterministic even at the API level (no temperature override allowed). Variance testing in iter 7 showed ~1 in 6 loop runs hit a nondeterministic regression: in one run the magazine_mead exemplar lost its italic markers around "New Yorker" even though the exact same input had produced a clean output 5 times prior. The scoring linter caught it (rule_magazine_name_italicized) but the formatter still emitted the bad output to the user. This commit adds a runtime guardrail: - New module src/cmos/runtime_validator.py — type-independent structural sanity checks. Operates on a single candidate string with no Exemplar context, because at runtime we don't know the source type. Checks: ends with period, no Ibid., has at least one italic span (almost every CMOS bibliography entry italicizes something), balanced * and " markers. Deliberately weaker than the scoring linter; it's a fast guardrail, not a full validator. - format_bibliography_entry now retries up to DEFAULT_MAX_RETRIES (2) times when the validator rejects a candidate. Independent re-calls are usually enough because the failures are stochastic. If every attempt fails, the LAST attempt is returned (no exception) — the caller still gets something usable, and the failure surfaces through the scoring linter or human review. The retry path costs zero on the common case (1 call per entry); ~1-2% extra calls on noisy drafts. Empirical: 3 consecutive loop runs after this change are scalar 1.000 canary 1.000 (vs 5/6 clean in the variance test before). Sample is too small to claim full suppression but the signal is positive. Also adds a new exemplar journal_multiauthor_secondary_first_last.toml captured from the user's HML draft (Hasanah et al., IJIDI 2024). It exercises the case where a multi-author entry has the first author inverted and the rest in First Last form — which the iter 7 HML run got wrong on one entry. Variance testing showed the exemplar passes 6/6 in isolation, so the original HML failure was nondeterminism, not a missing rule. Keeping the exemplar regardless: it adds canary coverage of a real-world multi-author pattern, no-DOI / JSTOR-URL variant, and the year-suffix author-date holdover stripping. Tests: 85 → 95 (8 new for runtime_validator + 2 new for formatter retry). All passing.
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@@ -81,3 +81,40 @@ def test_formatter_strips_whitespace_from_caller_output():
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output = format_bibliography_entry("anything", caller=fake_caller)
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assert output == "Yu, Charles. *Interior Chinatown*. Pantheon Books, 2020."
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def test_formatter_retries_on_validator_failure():
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"""If the runtime validator rejects the first attempt (e.g., italics
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missing), the formatter should retry and return a passing later attempt.
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Mirrors the iter 7 magazine_mead variance: GPT-5 sometimes drops italics
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around a magazine name, and a re-call typically succeeds."""
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attempts = []
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def flaky_caller(system: str, user: str) -> str:
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attempts.append(len(attempts) + 1)
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if len(attempts) == 1:
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# First attempt: italics dropped (validator should fail).
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return 'Mead, Rebecca. "Terms of Aggrievement." New Yorker, December 18, 2023.'
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# Retry: clean.
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return 'Mead, Rebecca. "Terms of Aggrievement." *New Yorker*, December 18, 2023.'
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output = format_bibliography_entry("messy mead", caller=flaky_caller)
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assert "*New Yorker*" in output
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assert len(attempts) == 2
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def test_formatter_returns_last_attempt_after_max_retries():
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"""If every attempt fails validation, return the last attempt and don't
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loop forever. We surface the failure later via scoring/canary, not by
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raising at runtime — the user should still get *something* back."""
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attempts = []
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def always_bad(system: str, user: str) -> str:
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attempts.append(1)
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return 'Mead, Rebecca. "Terms of Aggrievement." New Yorker, December 18, 2023.'
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output = format_bibliography_entry("messy", caller=always_bad, max_retries=2)
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# 1 initial + 2 retries = 3 calls total.
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assert len(attempts) == 3
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assert "*" not in output # the bad output is what we got
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