A transcription that landed while the private Whisper service was
restarting (an image roll) crashed hermes_stt_client.py with a raw
urllib ConnectionRefused traceback that got dumped into the
conversation. The client now retries the request with backoff (up to 5
attempts, ~10s - long enough to ride an STT pod restart) and, on a
persistent outage, exits with one concise line ('speech transcription
unavailable...') instead of a stack trace. Delivered via the coordinator
ConfigMap; the next reconcile picks it up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BvMSXH8VH2tMWXanb8SJdf
546e960185