Agent fails with "Failed to get response from the AI model; retried 5 times" after noop safe-output

[bryanchen-d]

Summary

During a gh-aw workflow run, the agent successfully completes its work (reads files, calls MCP tools, produces a noop safe-output), but then hits a server error loop and fails.

Reproduction

• Workflow: errors-triage.lock.yml mirrored onto shim.yml
• Run URL: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-engineering/actions/runs/23660178469
• Branch: brchen/error-triage-duplicate-detection
• Compiler version: v0.62.5
• Engine: copilot / claude-opus-4.6

Agent Log (Tail)

The agent completes its work and emits a noop safe-output, then immediately hits repeated server errors:

● noop
└ {"result":"success"}

● Response was interrupted due to a server error. Retrying...

● Response was interrupted due to a server error. Retrying...

● Response was interrupted due to a server error. Retrying...

● Response was interrupted due to a server error. Retrying...

● Response was interrupted due to a server error. Retrying...

Execution failed: Error: Failed to get response from the AI model; retried 5 times (total retry wait time: 5.9251769461139245 seconds) Last error: Unknown error

Run: errors-triage · microsoft/vscode-engineering@0ea95c8

Context

• The agent had already completed all its work — reading reference files, calling MCP tools (get_vscode_releases, get_errors, issue_read, etc.), and emitting the noop output.
• The failure happens after the successful noop call, suggesting the model encounters an error on the next turn (possibly trying to finalize/summarize).
• A previous run on the same branch (~30 min earlier, run 23659258158) completed successfully with similar workload.
• The total retry wait time is very short (~5.9s), suggesting the retries are not backing off much.

Expected Behavior

The agent should complete successfully after emitting its safe-output. If the model is unavailable on the finalization turn, ideally the run should still succeed since the meaningful work (safe-outputs) was already captured.

Questions

1. Is this a known transient issue with the Copilot inference backend?
2. Could gh-aw treat a run as successful if all safe-outputs were captured before the model error?

[benvillalobos]

I've also seen this happen intermittently with issue triage runs.