How a refusal reads#

A refusal prints Error: and its cause on stderr and exits with status 1; a missing or malformed flag, or a value outside the ones a flag lists, is a usage error the parser prints, and exits with status 2. Each refusal names the file or flag that failed and the values it read.

What a refusal leaves behind#

Nothing is written or removed before a refusal, and model train and checkpoint resume refuse before any weight changes, except for a non-finite loss, which is met only while training. Every command that writes a directory (corpus prepare, corpus split, model init, each checkpoint and a run directory) creates only that directory, never a missing parent, and removes what it created when it is refused while writing. A delete removes nothing without --confirm, and nothing when it refuses.

Each command's refusals#

Every command's page lists what it refuses, in the words it prints:

tokenizer train, tokenizer inspect, tokenizer delete
corpus prepare, corpus inspect, corpus split, corpus delete
model init, model train, model evaluate, model generate, model inspect, model delete
checkpoint list, checkpoint resume