The minimax wire lost its tier value on the assumption that these models
reason by default, so injecting nothing still reads as "on". T10 measured
the real gateway and the assumption does not hold: MiniMax-M3 with no
reasoning parameter did not reason in 5 of 5 rounds, while all six
strength values worked. Existing downstreams on ENABLE_THINKING=true
went from reasoning to silently not reasoning, and the capability table
cannot catch it because phase 5 lets auto through unconditionally.
Restore on_base to the old {"reasoning_effort": "medium"} verbatim. This
is a stopgap - it hands the tier choice back to the library, which this
work set out to remove. The real fix is to constrain auto by the
capability table, a public behaviour change tracked as issue #21.
The assertions that said "minimax injects no tier on the on-tier" go
back with it; each carries a note on why it moved twice.
`resolve_thinking` is exported, and its third argument turned from `bool`
into `Effort` this cycle — so the most natural downstream call now passes
the `"low"` it read out of JSON or config. Every gate inside compares by
identity, and `"none" is Effort.NONE` is always false: the tier was not
rejected, it was silently misjudged. Phase 2 read the on-form for a
request that wanted the off-form, Phase 4 was skipped entirely on a model
that cannot be disabled, and the only visible symptom arrived much later
as an AttributeError from `.value` — an exception that is neither
documented nor one of the four error classes.
Design 4.4 already lists this as the fourth entry a tier can come in
through; this makes the code agree with it.
The transport now hands back the tier it actually sent, and that tier
rides TransportResult into LLMResponse. It is not the requested one:
under EFFORT_FALLBACK=nearest a medium request goes out as low, and
telemetry grouping by the requested tier would file the row under a tier
that never left the process.
Reconciliation judges the same tier instead of the old enable_thinking
bool, and the warning throttle keys on it. Keyed on the bool, every tier
of one model shared a single key, so the second contradiction was
silenced for the lifetime of the transport. The predicate is an identity
check against Effort.NONE on purpose -- the member's value is the
non-empty string "none", so any truthiness test would send every strength
tier down the "asked to disable" branch and invert the alarm.
A provider that registered a disable form but no enable form was told
its shape was unknown and pointed at register_provider -- work it had
already done -- for a request that only ever needed the disable form.
The old bool code took the slot by direction; the tiered rewrite lost
that. Take the relevant field again, and keep "shape unknown" for the
case where both halves are missing, so the "cannot disable" wording
still owns the half-missing case.
The three-layer priority (call > source > enable_thinking sugar > silence)
now lives in one pure function, thinking.effective_effort(). The assembly
guard and the request hot path used to each carry their own inline copy of
the sugar conversion; two copies of the same judgement drift into the worst
shape there is - passes at assembly, raises at runtime.
The guard now also honours effort_fallback, so a source that opted into
nearest is no longer sentenced at assembly for a tier it could have mapped.
resolve_thinking now takes an Effort instead of a tri-state bool, and the
four gates become five. The new one sits ahead of the generic tier check
on purpose: asking for `none` on GLM-5.3 used to fall through to "none is
not supported, pick low/high/max", which loses both the fact that the
model cannot stop reasoning and the one tier the caller could switch to
right now. Without that alternative, downstream goes looking for
extra_body — which is how issue #20 happened in the first place.
The return type is a ThinkingResolution rather than the payload alone.
Under fallback="nearest" the tier that goes out is not the tier that was
asked for, and telemetry has to record the one that ran, or task 10 files
a call under a tier it never used. Ties in that mapping go to the weaker
side: a silent medium -> max is a multiple of the bill, and the library
does not raise a caller's price on its own.
Two readings the design left implicit, both settled the way its own
compatibility promise requires:
- `auto` is exempt from the tier list. It means "on, no tier named",
which in the body is the absence of the effort key, not a value of it.
Checking it against the list would break every existing source that
sets ENABLE_THINKING=true against deepseek-v4 or glm-5.3.
- `none` is never a mapping target. Turning "think less" into "do not
think" reverses the decision instead of cheapening it; a switch-only
model maps to `auto` and a model that only has `none` still errors.
Both call sites convert enable_thinking in place for now; task 5 folds
that into effective_effort along with the source- and call-level tiers.
Eight segments now, and each one holds a ThinkingWire instead of two
fixed fragments: off, on_base, and the key a tier gets written to. The
two fragments could not say "on, at this depth", which is what every
current generation model wants.
Two deliberate behaviour changes fall out of it. The openai segment stops
reporting its shape as unknown — reasoning_effort is OpenAI's own field,
not a vendor dialect, so a compatible endpoint behind the gateway takes
it. And minimax's on-tier stops carrying a hardcoded medium: that was the
library picking a price for the caller, and medium is not even a tier GLM,
kimi or deepseek serve.
The issue #5 guards stay; their sample moves from "the openai segment" to
an explicitly registered unknown one, which is what they always meant to test.
The boolean could say a model reasons or does not. It could not say what
GLM-5.3 and Gemini 3 Pro actually do: refuse to stop reasoning while
still letting you ask for less. So capability becomes the list of tiers a
model serves, and `none`'s presence in it is what "can_disable" now reads.
Effort carries `auto` alongside the strength tiers. Nine of the models on
our gateway are pure switches with no tier to name, and without `auto`
they would have to borrow a strength tier to mean "on" — which is the
exact bug this work exists to remove.
Tiers land as documented guesses from four registries that agree; every
entry says so in its evidence, and task 10 replaces them with measurements.
Three of them were the same shape as the bug this branch exists to fix:
something goes wrong, the library swallows it, and the caller is left
with a number that means the opposite of what happened.
The throttle key had no source in it. Five sources on one model is the
normal case here, so the first one to break would warn once and silence
the other four for the life of the process, and the message never said
which gateway to look at.
An unknown verdict in a cached entry threw away the whole response. The
rehydrator tolerates unknown fields but not unknown values of a known
field, so two library versions sharing a Redis would each invalidate
the other's entries: halved hit rate, and the only log line says the
cache rebuild failed. A purely observational field should not be able
to void a response whose content is intact.
Normalising for telemetry now degrades instead of raising, both for a
bare string and for a value outside the domain. Either one used to
reach the same except and cost the whole row, which is exactly how
1.3.0 lost nineteen calls without anyone noticing.
The M3 evidence sat at 08-02 for twenty-three days while nobody could
tell whether it still held. A declaration that goes stale in silence is
the failure this issue is really about, so the library now compares
what it declared against what it just observed and says so when the two
part ways.
Judgement is separated from logging: reconcile_thinking returns the
warning text, so tests assert on the text instead of parsing logs.
Two cases that look alike are kept apart — a model whose capability is
registered gets a drift warning quoting its evidence, an unregistered
one is never told the table said anything, because it never did.
False x UNKNOWN stays silent on purpose. UNKNOWN cannot falsify
anything, and warning on it would fire on every disabled call M3 makes
over the plain endpoint. A warning that always fires is not a warning.
providers.py had been holding two jobs: the registry of what each
provider looks like, and the decisions made from those declarations.
Adding response-side judgement would have made it the module for
everything about reasoning, so the decisions move to thinking.py and
the registry keeps only profiles and their lookup.
Moving a module breaks any deep-path import of what moved, so the six
public symbols are promoted to the package root at the same time. The
top level is this library's stated API surface; giving downstream a
stable name to import is what makes the next reorganisation harmless.
observe_thinking stays unexported — downstream reads the verdict off
LLMResponse, and exporting it would be a permanent promise for nothing.
reasoning_tokens=None has been carrying two meanings at once, no
reasoning and no report, and the library resolved the ambiguity by
quietly claiming the first. ThinkingObservation splits them: UNKNOWN
says the call left no signal, ABSENT says the provider reported zero.
The verdict ranks evidence by hardness. Reasoning prose is the fact
itself; reasoning_tokens is a report about the fact, so a missing
report cannot overrule prose that is right there. The prose check
strips first, since a gateway that returns whitespace is not evidence.
The enum lives in types.py, not in the new thinking.py, because
LLMResponse is typed on it and the innermost layer must not import a
decision module.
iomgaa