training failed: Command '[…py310…, '-m', 'venv', '/AI/guffcache/longcat_venv-train']'
  returned non-zero exit status 1.

An exit status is not a diagnosis. The actual reason was in the log only because
the child's stderr happened to land there:

  Fatal Python error: init_fs_encoding: failed to get the Python codec of the
  filesystem encoding
  ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'

Every step of the venv build went through subprocess.run(check=True), which
reports a number and discards what the process said. They now go through a runner
that raises with the child's output, truncated at both ends if it is long. The
next failure here names itself instead of needing a log archaeologist.

The environment is also stripped for anything that spawns the 3.10 interpreter —
PYTHONHOME, PYTHONPATH, VIRTUAL_ENV, PYTHONEXECUTABLE and friends — because that
is exactly the class of variable that produces the error above, and the failure is
fatal and silent in the parent. HF cache paths, CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES and
everything else still reach the child. This covers the venv build, the pip
installs, the service launch and the train/quantise workers; the service used
dict(os.environ) directly before.

Worth being straight about: I could NOT reproduce the failure. The same command
from a throwaway container on the same image, same user, same mount, exits 0 and
writes a complete venv, and the engine process has no PYTHONHOME, PYTHONPATH or
VIRTUAL_ENV in its environment. So this is not a confirmed fix for that specific
failure — it is the removal of the reason I cannot tell you what went wrong, plus
hardening against the one cause the error text points at. The retry will either
work or finally say why.

12 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0182DhR1eFNPQyGmDrpHbedY