The user guide's model-catalog section teaches the three new knobs at
task altitude — declare levels per model, pick the reasoning dialect,
reshape catalog models with modelOverrides — with the settings.yaml
example exercising all of them, plus an UNSUPPORTED_REASONING_EFFORT
troubleshooting row. The generated plugin config catalog picks up the
new Config fields, and the bilingual Agent Note records the decision,
the alternatives considered, and the schemastery materialization
constraint that chose false over {} as the disable spelling.
A route's modelOverrides dict customizes individual installed-catalog
models — key = catalog model id, value = the same fields a models entry
takes — while the rest of the catalog keeps serving, which a models list
cannot express because declaring one replaces the served set. An
override becomes the catalog entry's configuration and resolves through
the existing entry path, so capacities, reasoningEfforts, compat, and
request-default semantics are identical to a models entry's. Unlike
Pi's config layer, which ignores unknown ids, every override that lands
nowhere is refused at the write that produced it: beside a models list,
on a hand-declared route, naming a model the catalog does not describe,
or smuggling an id through the schema's unknown-key tolerance.
A model entry's reasoningEfforts dict declares its selectable thinking
levels — key = offered level, value = the wire spelling dispatch sends;
only off may leave the value empty (supported, send nothing). false
strips reasoning from a catalog model; every level is materialized
explicitly into pi-ai's thinkingLevelMap so nobody has to know pi-ai's
asymmetric absent-key defaulting. compat.thinkingFormat and
compat.supportsReasoningEffort become configurable on the route and per
model (model > route > catalog entry > pi-ai's URL-derived guess),
openai-completions only, so a private gateway speaking the DeepSeek
reasoning dialect no longer depends on its URL being recognizable.
Record-typed drift gates pin both enums to pi-ai's, and an unserviceable
declaration is refused at the write that produced it, naming route,
model, and level.
Yichen Jiang