when a call fails

One line under an amber error label, in plain words, never the provider's json, with the way out on the line below where there is one.

provider rejected the key                          set GROQ_API_KEY to a valid key
your groq key is out of credit                     top up at console.groq.com/settings/billing, or use another key
your openai key hit its spend limit                raise it at platform.openai.com/..., or use another key
provider rate limit, try again in 12s
provider rate limit, try again in a moment
provider daily limit reached, resets in 3h 12m
provider daily limit reached, resets tomorrow
the diff is too big for gpt-5.6-terra: 17842 tokens, limit 8192
                                                   try fewer commits, a narrower range, or WH_MODEL with a larger context
provider has no model gpt-6                        wh models lists the ones the provider offers
provider has no models endpoint                    <the base url that has none>
provider is overloaded, try again in a moment
provider returned no text
provider error: <the provider's message, cut short>
could not reach api.groq.com                       <curl's own last line>
lost the connection to api.groq.com

The set <var> to a valid key hint names the variable of the active provider; ollama has no key, so it has no hint. try again in a moment and resets tomorrow are the wording when the provider does not say how long. The too big line always carries its hint. could not reach is followed by curl's last stderr line with the curl: (N) prefix removed; lost the connection means the stream was cut after text had already arrived.

provider has no models endpoint is its own line on purpose: a 404 on the models path means the base url is a gateway that only proxies chat, never that the model is missing.

A few failures are not the provider's: not a git repository when you are outside one, curl not found when there is no curl on the path, and provider sent no reply or provider sent no http status when curl returned nothing usable.

headroom

A key nearly out of headroom (under a tenth of its window left, as reported by the provider) gets an amber warning after the answer:

low on groq tokens: 8.2k of 100k left, resets in 42s

the shared contract

The wording is a shared contract in shared/prompts/provider.md: the web terminal says the same things under the same amber error: label, so a failure reads the same wherever you ask.