[howlcipher]

A malformed optional response currently skips convergence after useful concepts have been produced. The pipeline now preserves execution telemetry before structured validation, allows at most one budgeted schema-only repair, and converges valid evaluated survivors while retaining PARTIAL status. Atomic phase checkpoints support explicit same-provider resume with preserved IDs, budgets, mutation seeds and appended history; completed expensive phases are skipped.

Validation: 78 tests pass (baseline 65), including successful/failed repair, truncated and duplicate JSON, earlier graph preservation, partial evaluated finalists, interruption/resume, disabled repair through fallback, secret redaction, and failed HTTP usage. Compile, repository Flake8, SEO and diff gates pass. A remote one-call Create smoke intentionally hit its budget and retained candidates for Dream; it was not labeled COMPLETE.

Depends on howlcipher/howl-provider-core#3 and pins its exact commit. Merge provider-core first, then Create, then companion Dream. No automatic merge requested.

Limits: single writer per run; old reports lack compatible checkpoint state; an unreceived in-flight receipt is unrecoverable; original budgets cannot be silently enlarged; historical failures keep resumed runs partial. No local inference was used.