HKUDS/Vibe-Trading · error · TypeError

'consecutive_failures' must be a non-negative integer

Error message

'consecutive_failures' must be a non-negative integer

What it means

Raised by Job from_dict (agent/src/scheduled_research/models.py:451) when 'consecutive_failures' is a bool, non-int, or negative. It counts successive failures for backoff/disable logic, so it must be a non-negative integer; bool is explicitly rejected because it subclasses int. Defaults to 0 when absent.

Source

Thrown at agent/src/scheduled_research/models.py:451

        job_id = data["id"]
        prompt = data["prompt"]
        schedule = data["schedule"]
        if not isinstance(job_id, str) or not isinstance(prompt, str) or not isinstance(schedule, str):
            raise TypeError("'id', 'prompt', and 'schedule' must be strings")
        next_run_at = data["next_run_at"]
        created_at = data["created_at"]
        if not isinstance(next_run_at, int) or not isinstance(created_at, int):
            raise TypeError("'next_run_at' and 'created_at' must be integers (epoch ms)")
        last_run_at = data.get("last_run_at")
        if last_run_at is not None and not isinstance(last_run_at, int):
            raise TypeError("'last_run_at' must be an integer (epoch ms) or null")
        consecutive_failures = data.get("consecutive_failures", 0)
        if (
            isinstance(consecutive_failures, bool)
            or not isinstance(consecutive_failures, int)
            or consecutive_failures < 0
        ):
            raise TypeError("'consecutive_failures' must be a non-negative integer")
        last_error = data.get("last_error")
        failure_kind = data.get("failure_kind")
        if last_error is not None and not isinstance(last_error, str):
            raise TypeError("'last_error' must be a string or null")
        if failure_kind is not None and failure_kind not in {"dispatch", "schedule"}:
            raise ValueError("'failure_kind' must be 'dispatch', 'schedule', or null")
        # Never raises: the store quarantines the whole file when a single
        # record fails to load, so an unusable timezone value degrades that
        # one job to UTC — the semantics it had before the field existed —
        # instead of taking every other job down with it. Absent, blank, and
        # non-string values all normalize to None.
        raw_tz = data.get("timezone")
        tz = raw_tz if isinstance(raw_tz, str) and raw_tz.strip() else None
        if raw_tz is not None and tz is None:
            logger.warning(
                "scheduled research job %s has an unusable timezone %r; "
                "evaluating its schedule in UTC",
                job_id,

View on GitHub (pinned to 80ffdda44c)

Solutions

  1. Clamp counters: max(0, failures)
  2. Keep counter arithmetic in int and avoid bools
  3. Omit the field to default to 0

Example fix

// before
record["consecutive_failures"] = failures - 1

// after
record["consecutive_failures"] = max(0, failures - 1)
Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

def failures_ok(v):
    return not isinstance(v, bool) and isinstance(v, int) and v >= 0

Type guard

def safe_failure_count(v, default=0):
    if isinstance(v, bool) or not isinstance(v, int) or v < 0:
        return default
    return v

Try / catch

try:
    job = Job.from_dict(record)
except TypeError as exc:
    if "consecutive_failures" in str(exc):
        record = dict(record); record["consecutive_failures"] = 0
        job = Job.from_dict(record)
    else:
        raise

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: {"consecutive_failures": -1} after resetting logic underflows, {"consecutive_failures": "2"} from stringified JSON, or {"consecutive_failures": True} from a flag mistakenly stored here.

Common situations: Retry bookkeeping that decrements below zero; JSON configs hand-edited with quoted numbers; storing a boolean 'failed' flag in the counter slot.

Related errors


AI-assisted analysis of HKUDS/Vibe-Trading@80ffdda44c (2026-08-28). Data as JSON: /api/errors/03b9f6b9443a7121. Report an issue: GitHub.