The four red e2e cases were blamed on MiniMax-M3 no longer reasoning.
Raw gateway probes show the opposite: M3 reasons fine (124 chars of
reasoning_content, prompt 194 to 216, completion 3 to 60). What changed
is that the MiniMax route stopped returning completion_tokens_details,
while qwen and deepseek still do on the same gateway and key. The
library already holds 185 chars of proof in LLMResponse.thinking and
never feeds it into any verdict.
The design turns that verdict into a first-class return value judged
from multiple signals, says UNKNOWN when a single response cannot tell,
and reconciles it against the capability table so a stale declaration
becomes a warning instead of a silent illusion.
The verifier caught that the disable-direction evidence only proved "no
regression", not "actually took effect": on M3 the disabled runs and the
no-opinion baseline are identically distributed, because that model does
not reason by default anyway. So the disable runs alone cannot rule out
the very failure mode issue #5 is about -- the parameter being silently
dropped upstream. The bogus-value experiment that does rule it out was
sitting in the findings document instead of the test suite; it is now
case L3b, and the L3 assertion that could never fail is gone.
Also from the review: the e2e helper caught bare Exception, which would
have disguised a library bug as an unavailable source, exactly the
silence the reporting discipline exists to prevent; the unregistered
model warning fired on every request instead of once per source; and the
transport caught ValueError broadly enough to mislabel unrelated errors,
now narrowed to a dedicated ThinkingUnsupportedError.
The design and plan still described the original judgement criteria,
which the measurements had already overturned. Both now match what the
tests actually do, and the design no longer claims the only new failure
surface is the openai one -- dissect configures MiniMax-M2.7 with
ENABLE_THINKING=false and will fail at assembly, which has to be
coordinated before this merges.
A sixteen-row matrix over 127 real calls: disable and enable on
MiniMax-M3 in both streaming and non-streaming mode, extra_body winning
over the profile slot, qwen and deepseek still disabling correctly, a
drift sentinel that re-derives every registered capability from live
behaviour, and the assembly guard refusing the models that cannot
comply.
Two judgement criteria had to be corrected by the data they were meant
to judge. Output length cannot separate the two regimes at all -- the
disabled runs reach 46 tokens when the model narrates its working in
the visible answer, and the enabled runs drop to 13 when medium effort
barely thinks. reasoning_tokens separates them cleanly in both
directions, which is precisely what issue #6 was collected for. A
second anchor compares prompt_tokens between the two regimes: the
vendor injects a reasoning instruction when thinking is on, so the
input side grows, and comparing the two runs relatively avoids
hardcoding any vendor number.
Provider names are mapped explicitly rather than guessed from the model
string; guessing had silently skipped the qwen row behind a "source
unavailable" reason that was not true.
Findings: live-API measurements across MiniMax M3/M2.7/M2.5, qwen and
deepseek, plus a survey of how nine unified gateways model per-model
parameter divergence. Key facts: reasoning_effort is MiniMax's real
switch, M2.x reasoning is mandatory and cannot be disabled, and the
relay's local token-count fallback silently drops reasoning_tokens.
Design: keep the parameter shape at provider level, push capability
down to model level, split "unknown" / "unsupported" / "no opinion"
into three distinct values, and fail at assembly time when a model
cannot honour enable_thinking=False.
AIMD ceiling now respects per-source max_concurrency and the pacer is
assembled explicitly in the client; MIN_CALLS parses as strict int;
acceptance doc corrects source-5 attempt count to 549; design and
migration notes aligned with implemented 429/stall/suppression
semantics and AIMD constants documented.
Records the human decision to test against the real gateway with real
data instead of building a mock gateway, six execution scenarios with
fault-source mixing, hard invariants scored from our own telemetry,
and the corpus inventory pulled from the lab server.