The Atomic Agents client was built with no timeout, so an Ollama server that
accepted the TCP connection but never replied (most commonly a large model still
loading into VRAM) left the CLI blocked in agent.run() forever. The caller's
`except Exception` handler only ever fired on connection-refused.
- llm.generate_candidates() takes a `timeout` parameter (default
DEFAULT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS = 300.0) and forwards it to the OpenAI client.
- openai.APITimeoutError is translated into a new domain-level
llm.LLMTimeoutError so main.py need not import openai itself, keeping the
atomic-agents/instructor dependency isolated to llm.py as documented.
- hcatOllama passes the new `ollamaTimeout` config value and prints
timeout-specific guidance (elapsed seconds, VRAM-loading hint, the setting to
raise) instead of the misleading "ensure Ollama is running" message.
- Documented `ollamaTimeout` in config.json.example and README.
Also closes two test gaps: the defensive `except ValueError` handler in
hcatOllama now has coverage, and the misleadingly-named `test_unknown_mode_raises`
is split into explicit unit tests of _build_request's mode validation. Ticked the
completed steps in the LLM Atomic Agents plan doc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
