🎯 Critical Decision: Who owns failure handling in Symphony's ecosystem?

🌟 Executive Summary

Symphony must decide how failure handling is distributed across its architecture:

• 🎼 Conductor-Only: Central orchestration manages all failures
• 👥 Community-Only: Individual models handle their own failures
• ⚖️ Hybrid: Shared responsibility with clear boundaries

This decision fundamentally shapes Symphony's extension philosophy, performance characteristics, and community adoption.

🏗️ The Three Approaches

🎼 Approach A: Conductor-Only Failure Handling

Core Principle: The Conductor is the master of all failure scenarios

User Request → Conductor → Model A → ❌ Any Failure
                ↓
Conductor detects and handles ALL failures:
• API timeouts → Retry with exponential backoff
• Memory errors → Switch to lighter model variant
• Invalid output → Reverse-reconstruct from downstream
• Model crashes → Activate fallback model

✅ Advantages

🧠 Unified Intelligence

• Single point of orchestration wisdom
• Consistent failure patterns across all models
• FQG training directly applicable to all failure scenarios

📊 Optimal Resource Management

• Conductor has global view of system resources