A configuration surface never holds a stored secret — it edits a redacted
descriptor — so once a key is saved, the draft it sends carries the route and
the endpoint and no credential at all. The interrogation went out
unauthenticated and the endpoint's 401 came back as "check the API key",
pointing at the one thing that was fine.
A named route now supplies its own credential, resolved exactly as a request
to it would be. A key typed into the form still wins: it is the one under
test, and may be the replacement for the stored one that is failing.
Resolution is a callback the probe invokes past the catalog short-circuit and
the protocol check, so a route answered from the installed registry costs no
credential lookup — and cannot fail over a credential the question never
needed.
llm.discoverModels was reachable from any declared trusted host. The
method takes a caller-supplied baseURL and makes the host issue a GET to
it, then reports the status or the parsed body — so on a LAN deployment
an anonymous caller had a probe for whatever the host can reach and the
browser cannot, plus a path that carries a draft credential. The
PRIVILEGED_METHODS doc already states the rule this broke: trustedHosts
is a DNS-rebinding fence, not authentication, so the configuration plane
stays loopback-same-origin. It is in that set now, asserted both against
the hand-built fence and over real HTTP beside the catalog reads that
deliberately stay reachable.
supportsDiscovery and listModelDiscoveryNamespaces are gone. The field
was required on the wire and read by nobody: its own contract said a
surface should offer the action "instead of naming an adapter family it
would have to hardcode", while the surface hardcodes llm-pi-ai in two
places and gates the button on whether there is anything to probe. Its
shape did not fit the second caller either — the create card has no row
to read a per-row field from. Keeping a required field alive for a
consumer that may never arrive costs every producer and fixture a value
nobody consults, which is exactly how the fixtures drifted. The registry
that fed it had no other production consumer, so registration and
disposal are now observed through the offer itself.
The Agent Note claimed the key is never logged, which the wire schema
beside it already contradicts, and predated both the provider field and
the catalog-answer path. The two new public types pointed at core.md
without a type-equiv block or manifest entry, so the generated service
catalog named documentation that did not exist.
pi-ai resolves a request's apiKey override only through a provider that
declares an api-key method: resolveProviderAuth short-circuits to that
method when the override is present, and otherwise falls through to the
credential store and then to ambient discovery. A provider with no
api-key method at all therefore resolves to nothing, and the request
fails with "Provider is not configured" before any network I/O.
Two routes hit that. openai-codex ships OAuth alone, so moving off the
/compat dispatch broke a profile that names a key for it — the old path
handed the token straight to the provider. And a catalog route naming an
api was being rebuilt with the harness's own auth, so `openai: {api:
openai-completions}` stopped reading OPENAI_API_KEY, contradicting the
documented promise that omitting a credential keeps provider-native
discovery.
Auth is now one decision for both constructions. A catalog route keeps
its installed provider's auth, through an api override too: which
environment a provider reads belongs to the provider, not to the wire
format its models speak. A catalog provider with no api-key method gets
the harness method beside its own, but only when the profile names a
credential — a keyless codex profile keeps the honest refusal, since
this adapter holds no OAuth store to resolve through.
Materialization now spreads the installed entry instead of enumerating
the result, so a Model field this package does not model survives a
pi-ai upgrade; headers went missing from an nvidia route exactly that
way once already. providerInfo reports the configured displayName, which
also joins the registration facts so a rename re-registers rather than
leaving the old label in every selector. A refused registration swap
gets its own diagnostic naming the route, matching the directory swap
beside it.
The README documented endpoint interrogation this layer does not
implement, and still described unknown providers as kept-last-good after
they became legal declarations refused at the write point. The Agent
Note claimed per-model reasoning configurability the schema never had,
required capacities the route now defaults, and stated an apiKey
override that short-circuits unconditionally.
Three defects surfaced while driving the Models page.
A hand-declared model needed an explicit contextWindow and maxTokens,
but a provider listing usually returns ids and nothing else — so the
page happily wrote a profile the adapter then rejected, which took the
whole namespace down silently. Capacities now fall back to the route's
`defaultContextWindow` (262,144) and `defaultMaxTokens` (32,768). Both
are guesses by construction, which is why they are route fields a
deployment corrects once rather than constants buried in the adapter;
the fallback sizes the model and never becomes a per-request cap.
That silent failure was the second defect. A schema-valid profile the
adapter could not serve was stored and only rejected later, disabling
every route in the namespace with nothing said. `dsh-settings` gains an
optional `validate` on registration — a check for what a schema cannot
express — and `llm-pi-ai` refuses an unserviceable section at the write
that produced it. A stored section that fails keeps the namespace's last
good value, as a schema failure already did, so an externally edited
document still cannot strand the owner. The plugin's own last-good
fallback goes with it: nothing reaching it can fail any more.
Third, a model with no reasoning metadata advertised the single level
`off`, which pi-ai translates to *omitting* the reasoning option — the
same request naming no effort produces. Selecting it disabled nothing,
so a provider whose default is to think kept thinking with `off` shown
as selected. Such a model now reports no reasoning capability at all,
which is the seam's way of saying the control is unavailable, and the
per-model `reasoning` flag is gone: without a thinkingLevelMap to spell
levels it could only invent them.
The protocol table narrows to the three a hand-declared route reaches
today, most-reached first so a surface offering a choice defaults to the
one gateways actually speak.
Review found four defects in the declared-provider work.
`PiAiAdapter` reused one `Models` collection and mutated it whenever the
configuration changed. `Models.streamSimple()` resolves its provider
lazily — when the stream is first consumed, which is after the adapter
awaits the route's credential — so a configuration change landing in
that window let an in-flight request finish under a configuration it
never resolved against, or fail on a provider that no longer existed.
Each resolution now produces an immutable snapshot and every operation
captures one before its first await, which is what makes the seam's
per-step freeze (`llm.prepareCall()`) hold end to end: switching models
mid-reply takes effect on the next step, never inside the one in flight.
`defaultMaxTokens` was materialized from the catalog's `Model.maxTokens`.
The two answer different questions: pi-ai requires that field as the
model's output capability, while the seam's is a cap the deployment
chose to send on requests naming none, so every request had started
carrying a number nobody picked. Only an explicitly configured cap
reaches the seam now.
The configurable-provider directory was refreshed by disposing its
registration and making a new one. A candidate set the registry refuses
— a profile keyed `deepseek-official`, which llm-deepseek declares —
left the whole directory withdrawn and the Models page empty, silently,
because the settings callback contains the failure. The seam's
registration handle now carries `replace()` with the same
validate-first atomicity `registerAdapter` has.
The protocol table offered every pi-ai streaming API, including four
whose authentication a profile cannot express: Bedrock signs with SigV4
over AWS credentials and a region, Vertex needs a project, a location,
and ADC, Azure needs provider environment plus an api-version, and Codex
uses OAuth. Offering them handed back routes that cannot authenticate.
Catalog routes still reach them through their own provider.
A pi-ai route had to name an installed catalog provider, served that
catalog's models verbatim, and could override only the endpoint. An
OpenAI-compatible gateway, a self-hosted server, or a model newer than
the pinned pi-ai release was therefore unreachable, and a stale context
window could not be corrected without upgrading the package.
A route is now a declaration whose defaults come from the installed
catalog. `catalog.ts` merges that catalog under the profile's own model
entries, `provider.ts` builds the pi-ai Provider (reusing the catalog
provider when the route keeps its protocol, so implementations this
package cannot reconstruct keep working), and the adapter serves every
operation from one `createModels()` collection. That also retires the
`@earendil-works/pi-ai/compat` import, which pi-ai documents as a
temporary entry point it deletes with its ModelManager migration.
Credentials stay on the harness seam: the resolved key rides the request
as pi-ai's highest-priority auth override, so `Models` holds no
credential store and a named-but-missing reference still fails loud
instead of falling back to an unrelated ambient key.
A model's configured maxTokens now reaches the seam as defaultMaxTokens.
The remaining P1 from the #939 review, plus the P2 it shares a mechanism with.
Nothing carried a version, so two tabs editing one namespace silently
overwrote each other — reproduced as tab B's `reasoning` lost to tab A's
older draft. The seam's per-namespace write queue orders writes; it cannot
tell a fresh writer from one replaying a snapshot a predecessor superseded.
Each namespace now carries a monotonic `revision` over its RAW section. A
write may send `expectedRevision`, checked at the FRONT of the queue (not at
call time, which would race the very predecessor it guards against); a
mismatch rejects with `SettingsConflictError` → `settings-conflict` on the
wire, carrying both revisions. The editor captures the revision it opened at
and, on conflict, asks the user to reopen rather than replaying its snapshot.
The same counter fixes the missing broadcast. `settings/updated` is gated on
the resolved value — correct for consumers, wrong for configuration surfaces:
storing an override equal to the composition base leaves the resolved value
alone while changing what the document says (the field is now overridden, not
inherited) and moving every open editor's revision. `settings/document-updated
(ns, revision)` fires on any raw-section change, in-process or external, and
`host/settings-changed` now rides it.
That event also closes the stale model picker: editing a provider's `models`
changes no route, so `llm/adapters-updated` never fired and an open picker
kept serving the old catalog. A change to an exposed provider namespace now
emits `host/models-changed` too — that namespace holds the catalog.
Docs: both sides of the five touched README pairs, a type-equiv block for
`SettingsPathOp`, and an Agent Note recording what the plane exposes and who
may overwrite what. The deferred wire-redaction gaps (secrets behind
union/intersection/transform, `.default(...)` in the served envelope, schema
text in rejection messages, `new Function` rehydration, pi-ai's `headers`) are
recorded as TODO(settings-wire-redaction) and in Known Limitations rather than
half-fixed.
The policy home's resolve() now stamps readDenyPaths, so every consumer
that pins the resolved shape (bash-sandbox hand-off, tool-fs stamps)
carries it, and three uncovered branches gained real tests: landlock
reporting partial enforcement for a denial it cannot express, the
policy's default under programmatic construction, and both ambient
credential paths in llm-deepseek without a mounted seam.
ctx.llm gains 'llm/adapters-updated' — a payload-free registry notification
emitted at every topology commit point (adapter routes registering or
disposing, directory entries appearing or withdrawing) with contained
observers and INVARIANT rethrow — plus registerConfigurableProviders/
listConfigurableProviders, the directory of routes an adapter plugin can
activate through configuration. llm-deepseek declares deepseek-official
(whole llm-deepseek section as profile); llm-pi-ai declares the full
installed catalog under providers.<provider> even while dormant, so the
web settings surface can offer every provider before any route exists.
The invariant companion asserts the registry stays readable at each
notification.
An empty or omitted providers dict is now the valid dormant posture: the
adapter mounts with zero routes and no catalog entries, registers routes
the moment the llm-pi-ai settings section supplies profiles, and drops
them when it empties. The TUI demo mounts the adapter bare, so adding an
openai/anthropic provider is purely a settings.yaml (or, next PR, web
form) operation with per-request apiKeyEnv credential resolution.
New credentials data-structure page (type-equiv manifested), group README,
rewritten llm-deepseek/llm-pi-ai READMEs (dynamic configuration, dict
profiles, credential chain), capability-seams/service-role registration,
Agent Note (bilingual), demo compositions mounting settings-local +
credentials-local with no inline key plumbing, installSettingsSection
consumer helper on the settings seam (deduplicating both adapters' wiring),
jscpd symmetry markers for the provider twins, runtime-closure additions for
python/sdk-runtime, and doc-budget ceilings AGENTS.md 1750→1755 /
packages/README.md 850→865 for the structural one-line group rows.
A well-formed provider stream that ends with finish_reason stop and zero
content blocks previously became a successful empty assistant message: the
turn completed silently, and drivers like goal-session counted the no-op
round. Both adapters now map that degenerate completion to a finish
{kind:'error'} with the new canonical EMPTY_RESPONSE code from dsh-llm, and
dsh-llm-retry adds the code to its default retryable set, so the existing
closed-step recovery path retries it and fails loud once the budget is
exhausted.
Covered by adapter unit tests, an llm-retry default-policy test, and a new
authored keyless ACP snapshot (empty-response-retry) with a deterministic
1 ms zero-jitter retry overlay.
Pass each resolved catalog model capacity into pi-ai stream conversion so the upstream full-message classifier can recognize provider-specific, silent, and length-stop overflow signals. Retain the harness text fallback for legacy provider wording and cover the catalog-resolution path with a mock-provider regression.
Every packages/*/* README now carries a canonical '## Known Limitations and
Deferred Work' section: condensed, evidence-backed bullets for consumer-visible
gaps (unimplemented features, platform caveats, MVP cuts) and consciously
postponed work (TODO/FIXME/XXX markers, RFC deferrals still open). The ten
pre-existing ad-hoc variants ('What is NOT here (TODO)', 'Deferred',
'Limitations (MVP)', 'Known limitations (tracked TODOs)', ...) are normalized
into the canonical heading.
A new doc-sync gate, scripts/verify-readme-limitations.ts, enforces the shape:
exactly one limitations-like heading per package README, byte-equal to the
canonical h2, with at least one bullet; near-miss headings fail so variants
cannot creep back. Packages with genuinely nothing to declare (dsh-brand,
dsh-timeout, dsh-subagent-mock, dsh-app-boot) are whitelisted in the script and
must NOT carry the section; whitelist entries are validated against the scanned
package set so a rename fails loud.
Wired into the doc-sync chain (package.json) and the run-gates doc-sync leaf
set; the standing rule lands in packages/AGENTS.md and the adding-a-package
cookbook; decision record in
docs/rfc/implemented/process/2026-07-10-readme-known-limitations-gate.md
(RFC index regenerated).
Also fixes two stale '(deferred)' markers claiming dsh-compact-basic is
unimplemented (the dsh-compact seam README's package table and the seam's
module doc comment).
GenerateOptions.prefill had no production setter and both adapters
rejected it with LlmError('UNSUPPORTED') — its entire observable
behavior was two throws, each pinned by one adapter test. DeepSeek's
chat-prefix completion is a Beta feature on a base URL neither adapter
targets. ToolSchema.strict was threaded through defineTool, the
registry's schemas() allowlist, the deepseek wire mapping, a per-tool
payload-patching pass in the pi-ai adapter, and a tool-catalog render
row, yet no shipped tool set it and the internal endpoint story for
strict mode was never built.
Remove both fields end-to-end: the vocabulary in dsh-llm, the adapter
guards and wire branches, the dsh-tools threading, the tool-catalog
Strict row, the pinning tests, the core.md pastes, the adapter README
rows, and the cookbook line that used prefill as the UNSUPPORTED
example (now stated generically). The pi-ai payload fixup keeps the
half with a job: pi-ai stamps strict:false on every serialized tool,
so the fixup scrubs it unconditionally for wire parity with the
hand-rolled twin (per-tool set/delete machinery gone). temperature/
stop/maxTokens are untouched — honored end-to-end by both adapters.
Each knob returns with its first real producer: prefill with an
adapter that implements chat-prefix completion, strict with a tool
that wants it and a beta-endpoint story.
RFC: docs/rfc/implemented/simplification/2026-07-04-drop-inert-request-knobs.md
(moved from proposed/, amended to shipped reality); the content-block
vocabulary RFC's consequence line now records prefill as producer-gated.
dsh-llm owns the vocabulary (attribution.ts): AppIdentity with the version
read from the package manifest, userAgent(), and attributionHeaders(target,
identity) over a closed AttributionTarget union ('generic' | 'openrouter').
Both adapters send the headers on every provider request — llm-deepseek in
its fetch headers, llm-pi-ai through pi-ai's StreamOptions.headers — behind
an explicit attributionTarget config (never inferred from baseURL), with
mock-server tests asserting exact wire arrival and the absence of the
OpenRouter set by default.
The RFC moves to implemented/ amended with the settled identity (the
deepseek-harness token, the DeepSeek Harness title, the planned
deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness-sdk URL behind a FIXME until that repo exists)
and the explicit-config OpenRouter decision.
ImageBlock had no production producer and every consumer dropped it:
the deepseek serializer skipped it, the pi-ai converter skipped it as
unrepresentable, the ACP bridge neither advertises image prompt
capability nor forwards image blocks, and compact-basic charged a flat
85-token estimate and rendered an [image] placeholder. A block
constructed today would silently vanish from the wire — the vocabulary
advertised a capability no path honors, the silent-data-loss shape the
defensive patterns warn against. The only constructors were tests
pinning the skip/estimate branches.
Remove ImageBlock and its ContentBlockMap entry (its cache?: CacheHint
field leaves with it; CacheHint itself and the other two cache? fields
are out of scope). compact-basic loses its explicit image estimate and
placeholder arms (the merge-extensible default arms absorb the case);
the deepseek serializer, pi-ai converter, and ACP codec already handled
image in their default arms, so only their image-naming comments
change. The codec's inbound rejection of ACP-protocol image prompt
content stays — that guards wire content a client can send regardless
of our vocabulary.
Tests that constructed harness image blocks to pin the removed branches
are dropped (the 85-token estimate pin) or retargeted onto plugin-added
block types / other non-text blocks, which the surviving default arms
own. Docs, the type-equiv pastes, and the content-block vocabulary
RFC's block list and multimodal-home consequence are updated in the
same change; the RFC moves to implemented/ and the index is
regenerated. A real multimodal feature reintroduces image via
declaration merging together with the adapter mapping, ACP
advertisement, and compaction pricing that honor it.