gitea's template-generate is slow-async on this instance (repo not writable for >40s; infra#179) — no synchronous MCP tool can wait that long, and the 60s retry made the call hang until the client timed out. Bound the write-readiness retry to 5s (a healthy gitea commits in ~1s and this still catches it), and when the branch isn't writable in time, return a clear partial_failure: repo created, substitution deferred, finalize locally with `hyperguild new-project`. Substitution logic is intact and completes automatically once generate is fast (infra#179). Tool description updated to describe substitution as best-effort. Refs #42, infra#179. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>