Mike's must-fix. Diagnosed from RAW output of failing queries (not guessed):
- grok xsearch = TIMEOUT: grok-4.20-multi-agent web_search runs past budget on multi-part queries
(286s/280s, rc=124, still searching - 183 thoughts, only progress-noise text); buffered json => total loss.
- gemini search = INTERMITTENT empty turn (a clean re-run gave a real 2.6KB answer in 122s); the wrapper
retried only once, so two empties in a row failed spuriously.
Fixes:
- ask-gemini.sh emit_or_fail: retry up to 3x with 3s/6s backoff (was 1).
- ask-grok.sh xsearch: --output-format streaming-json (salvage partials) + AUTO-FALLBACK to
ask-gemini.sh search when grok doesn't finish (rc!=0 or empty). Validated e2e: grok timed out
(rc=124) -> fell back -> gemini returned a real sourced answer (UniFi Teleport invite-link API).
grok's own multi-agent timeout is an xAI-side limitation; the fallback makes xsearch reliable regardless.
Docs: grok SKILL.md xsearch row + CT_THOUGHTS Thought 2 Resolution.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mike Swanson
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