Clicking "fetch available models" on a built-in provider went to the
network. That is the wrong source: pi-ai's registry is the authoritative
list for its own providers, and it carries the context windows and output
caps a `GET /models` listing does not disclose. Asking api.deepseek.com
what DeepSeek serves is both slower and worse, and against an endpoint
that answers a different shape it failed outright.
Interrogation is still keyed by settings namespace — the provider being
added has no route — but the request may now name the route it is
editing. An adapter that already describes that route answers from what
it knows, needs no endpoint at all, and never touches the network; only a
route the catalog does not describe reaches the wire, and one naming no
endpoint is told to set one or enter its models by hand.
`ConfigurableProviderView` gained `supportsDiscovery` so a surface offers
the action where a namespace can answer instead of hardcoding an adapter
family.
Three narrower corrections ride along. Discovery no longer claims Azure
or Codex: Azure authenticates with an `api-key` header and an
`api-version` query despite its OpenAI lineage, and Codex uses OAuth, so
both reported an authentication failure as a provider with no models.
Cancellation during the body read escaped as the raw abort reason rather
than a coded ABORTED. And the schema comment claiming the probe key is
never logged overstated it: the host neither stores nor returns it, but
it rides the client's outgoing envelope like every other secret-bearing
payload, and redacting that tap is a configuration-plane-wide change.
Once a pi-ai route became a declaration rather than a catalog lookup,
adding an OpenAI-compatible gateway meant knowing its model ids up
front. Most such endpoints publish that list at `GET /models`, but no
seam operation could ask: every one is keyed by a registered provider
route, and the provider being added has no route, no stored profile,
and no stored credential — the endpoint and key are values in a form.
Interrogation is therefore keyed by settings namespace, which a
configuration surface already holds from the configurable-provider
directory. `registerModelDiscovery` offers it per namespace,
`discoverModels` asks, and the request carries the draft itself. The
reply is candidates, not a catalog: every field but the id is optional
because most listings disclose nothing else, and adopting one is a
settings write like any other. Nothing here reads or writes settings or
credentials, so `settings.yaml` still decides what a route serves.
`llm.discoverModels` carries the same draft over the wire. Its apiKey is
the third and last payload a secret may ride, and it is never stored,
logged, or echoed; every refusal folds into `model-discovery-failed`,
naming the endpoint asked but never the credential offered.
The pi-ai side is a plain GET for OpenAI-compatible protocols only —
their listing shape is the one gateways, self-hosted servers, and the
official endpoints agree on. Others say so, sending the user to
hand-entry rather than reporting a guessed shape as an empty provider.
The reply is read under a four-megabyte ceiling held on the bytes
actually received, because the endpoint is a URL the user typed.
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.
A catalog entry may now carry its own `maxTokens`, matching the shape the
pi-ai adapter already exposes. Exact-model resolution prefers it over the
profile value, so capping one model no longer means capping the route.
Defaults are unchanged: an entry without a cap, and any unlisted
pass-through id, still resolve to the profile `maxTokens` (256,000), and the
shipped catalog keeps its context windows.
Resuming a long session (196k events, 2.2k steps, 1.8k tool cards) took
~12s to render and ~800ms to echo one keystroke:
- Every step's timing footer called stepTimingAt, which replayed the whole
event log per footer - O(steps x events) on the initial render.
- pi-tui re-renders every component each frame and relies on per-component
line caches, but ToolCardComponent/ContextCardComponent built throwaway
Text/Markdown instances inside render(width), re-wrapping every settled
card's output on every keystroke.
Replace the per-footer replay with one shared StepTimingTracker per chat
mount (single O(events) cursor over the append-only log), and cache card
rows by width via CardLineCache, dropped by every state mutator and
invalidate().
Measured (tmux 200x50, 196k-event session): resume prompt-ready ~12s -> ~7.6s;
per-keystroke echo ~800ms median -> ~11ms.
The ShellDialect marker on BashExecutor and the load-time rejection in
tool-bash/tool-pwsh force every test and example fake executor to declare
a dialect for a guard with no in-repo or plausible deployment to catch
(shipped compositions always pair the tool with its matching executor),
and they break the example composition suites that stub ctx.bash without
a dialect (agent-spine-demo/cli-demo/acp-demo lost the bash tool).
Keep the non-dialect doc fixes that landed with the attempt: the tool-bash
README bashEnv contract trim with the stale example import removed, the
acp-snapshot suite.ts 'usable pwsh' JSDoc, and the pwsh.cordis.yml comment
indent. The parity note records the attempt and revert under Alternatives.
The seam gains ShellDialect ('bash' | 'powershell' - concrete shells, not
families: zsh or fish would be their own values, never 'bash'); bash-local
declares bash (bash-sandbox inherits), pwsh-local declares powershell, and
both tools throw at load when the mounted executor speaks another dialect -
previously tool-pwsh over bash-local handed PowerShell text to bash -c and
the deployment error surfaced as ordinary nonzero exits. Pinned by mismatch
tests on both tools; the parity note records the contract (both languages).
Also from the review round: the tool-bash README's managed-environment
section becomes a summary linking the owning dsh-bash-env contract (the
duplicated prose carried a stale owner in its example import), the
pwshOnly JSDoc drops the stale 'on PATH' phrasing, and the task-tools
contract comment in the two pwsh compositions is indented into its block.
