abhigyanpatwari/GitNexus · error · SandboxError

Compound Engineering plugin exceeds the total byte limit

Error message

Compound Engineering plugin exceeds the total byte limit

What it means

Cumulative size guard in _build_ce_plugin_snapshot. The running total of payload bytes across all admitted files must stay within MAX_CE_PLUGIN_TOTAL_BYTES (16 MiB). Once a file pushes total_bytes past the cap, the snapshot is rejected. Per-file bytes (error 541/543) already bound each entry; this bounds the whole plugin.

Source

Thrown at eval/workflow_bench/runtime_mounts.py:434

def _build_ce_plugin_snapshot(config: CePluginConfig, destination_parent: Path) -> CePluginSnapshot:
    parent = _validated_runtime_root(destination_parent, label="CE plugin snapshot parent")
    root = Path(tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix="wfbench-ce-plugin-", dir=parent))
    root.chmod(0o700)
    entries: list[dict[str, Any]] = []
    total_bytes = 0
    try:
        for relative, source in _plugin_files(config.source):
            relative_text = relative.as_posix()
            if len(relative_text.encode()) > MAX_CE_PLUGIN_PATH_BYTES:
                raise SandboxError(f"Compound Engineering plugin path exceeds the byte limit: {relative_text}")
            if len(entries) >= MAX_CE_PLUGIN_FILES:
                raise SandboxError("Compound Engineering plugin exceeds the file-count limit")
            payload, executable = _bounded_plugin_bytes(source)
            total_bytes += len(payload)
            if total_bytes > MAX_CE_PLUGIN_TOTAL_BYTES:
                raise SandboxError("Compound Engineering plugin exceeds the total byte limit")
            _write_snapshot_file(
                root / Path(*relative.parts),
                payload,
                executable=executable,
            )
            entries.append(
                {
                    "path": relative_text,
                    "sha256": hashlib.sha256(payload).hexdigest(),
                    "size": len(payload),
                    "executable": executable,
                }
            )

        manifest_path = root / ".claude-plugin" / "plugin.json"
        try:
            plugin_manifest = json.loads(manifest_path.read_text())
        except (OSError, UnicodeError, json.JSONDecodeError) as exc:

View on GitHub (pinned to d540b00184)

Solutions

1. Measure: 'du -sh <plugin_dir>' and 'du -ah <plugin_dir> | sort -rh | head' to find the biggest contributors, then trim.
2. Move bulky reference data out of the plugin and fetch it by content hash at runtime.
3. Drop unused assets (extra languages, unused skills' resources, doc PDFs).
4. If the plugin genuinely needs more, split into separately versioned releases and mount only what each arm run needs.

Example fix

# before
assets/embeddings/*.bin  # 22 MiB across 12 files
# after
assets/embeddings/manifest.json  # hashes + URLs; fetched on demand

from pathlib import Path

MAX_TOTAL = 16 * 1024 * 1024
plugin = Path("ce-plugin")
total = sum(p.stat().st_size for p in plugin.rglob("*") if p.is_file())
if total > MAX_TOTAL:
    raise SystemExit(f"plugin total {total} bytes exceeds {MAX_TOTAL}")

MAX_CE_PLUGIN_TOTAL_BYTES = 16 * 1024 * 1024

def total_within_bound(total_bytes: int) -> bool:
    return total_bytes <= MAX_CE_PLUGIN_TOTAL_BYTES

try:
    snapshot = _build_ce_plugin_snapshot(config, destination_parent)
except SandboxError as exc:
    if "total byte limit" in str(exc):
        log.error("plugin > 16 MiB; move bulk data out")
    raise

When it happens

Trigger: The sum of all plugin file sizes exceeds 16 MiB. Typical producers: many medium assets (icons, fonts, embeddings), a large bundled dataset split into <2 MiB chunks that together exceed 16 MiB, or a vendored model/grammar pack.

Common situations: Embedding a reference corpus, shipping multiple binary helpers under 2 MiB each, bundling grammar files for many languages, including docsets.

Related errors

• Compound Engineering plugin file exceeds the per-file limit:
• {label} exceeds the bounded evidence limit
• transcript artifact exceeds the bounded run-output limit
• Compound Engineering plugin file must be regular and non-sym
• Compound Engineering plugin path exceeds the byte limit: {re

AI-assisted analysis of abhigyanpatwari/GitNexus@d540b00184 (2026-08-12). Data as JSON: /api/errors/f94e76fa4a1fc0e6. Report an issue: GitHub.