diff --git a/src/axolotl/core/builders/causal.py b/src/axolotl/core/builders/causal.py
index e5bc21762..191ff388e 100644
--- a/src/axolotl/core/builders/causal.py
+++ b/src/axolotl/core/builders/causal.py
@@ -424,7 +424,7 @@ class HFCausalTrainerBuilder(TrainerBuilderBase):
     ):
         if training_args.pretraining:
             if (
-                self.cfg.pretraining_sample_concatenation is False
+                not self.cfg.pretraining_sample_concatenation
                 or self.cfg.micro_batch_size > 1
             ):
                 return DataCollatorForSeq2Seq(self.tokenizer, **kwargs)
diff --git a/src/axolotl/exception_handling.py b/src/axolotl/exception_handling.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..e69de29bb