UI/UX: Poor Error Handling UX in Async Dispatcher

[tomaioo]

Summary

UI/UX: Poor Error Handling UX in Async Dispatcher

Problem

Severity: Medium | File: skyrl-agent/skyrl_agent/dispatcher/async_utils.py:L53

In async_utils.py, the wait_all function cancels pending tasks on timeout but uses a generic asyncio.TimeoutError without context about which tasks timed out or how many were pending. This provides poor UX for debugging distributed training failures.

Solution

Include the number of pending tasks and their identifiers in the exception message. Consider creating a custom TimeoutError subclass with metadata about pending vs. completed tasks.

Changes

• skyrl-agent/skyrl_agent/dispatcher/async_utils.py (modified)

[gemini-code-assist]

Code Review

This pull request improves the timeout error reporting in wait_all by including details about the pending tasks. The reviewer suggests a valuable improvement to extract the actual coroutine names instead of generic task names, which will make the timeout error messages significantly more informative.

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[gemini-code-assist]

Since the tasks are created inside wait_all using asyncio.create_task(c) without explicit names, task.get_name() will return generic names like 'Task-1', 'Task-2', etc. This does not provide useful context about which coroutines actually timed out.

To make the error message much more informative, you can extract the name of the underlying coroutine using task.get_coro().__name__ with a fallback to task.get_name().

        pending_names = [
            getattr(task.get_coro(), "__name__", None) or task.get_name()
            for task in pending
        ]
        raise asyncio.TimeoutError(
            f"Timeout waiting for {len(pending)} pending task(s) out of {len(tasks)} total. "
            f"Pending tasks: {pending_names}
        )