Every HfHubHTTPError was retried (pre-existing, preserved when the guard was extracted), so a wrong token or a gated repo burned all five attempts with backoff before showing the user the same message and postponed the install cooldown. 401/403/404/410 now fail fast; 429/5xx keep retrying. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>