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 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.
Four review findings across the seam and both adapters.
registerAdapter now returns a handle carrying replace(providers): the
candidate route set is validated in full before anything moves, so a
route another adapter owns leaves the previous registration intact, and
the swap itself is one synchronous section with no observable gap. pi-ai
uses it instead of dispose-then-register — the old shape dropped every
route when the new set conflicted, and its facts cache could then equal
the registry's, so reverting to a working configuration never re-applied.
Its registration facts are also sorted by provider, so a settings
document that merely reorders keys no longer triggers a swap.
DeepSeek's per-request snapshot now carries the credential facts, and
resolveApiKey receives it instead of re-reading the raw config: a
settings generation the resolver rejects can no longer contribute its
literal key to a request the previous generation's endpoint serves.
pi-ai only defers to the SDK's provider-native discovery when a profile
names no credential at all; a configured apiKeyEnv that misses now fails
with MISSING_CREDENTIAL naming the route and the reference, instead of
handing pi-ai undefined and letting it authenticate with an unrelated
ambient key.
The eager boot-time credential probe is gone: it could run before the
credentials service mounted and reported every failure as a missing key.
The route stays registered and browsable; the first request gives the
accurate error, whose guidance now leads with the credential store and
mentions a literal apiKey last.
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.
providers becomes a dict keyed by provider route, so the composition base
and the llm-pi-ai settings section merge per provider and the route set is
structural; the pre-release array shape and per-profile provider field fail
loud with migration directions. The adapter reads a profiles thunk once per
operation and resolves the credential per stream call (literal apiKey, then
apiKeyEnv through ctx.credentials with an ambient env fallback, then pi-ai's
provider-native discovery), so key, endpoint, and knob changes reach the
next request without restarts. Route-set or captured-retry-policy changes
re-register the same adapter instance in one synchronous section; an invalid
settings snapshot keeps the last good profiles.
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.
pi-ai 0.80 restructured its entrypoints: the static catalog reads now
live on /providers/all as getBuiltinModels/getBuiltinProviders (keyed by
the catalog-only BuiltinProvider type, replacing KnownProvider at those
call sites), and the global streamSimple moved to /compat. The config
schema gains the new 'max' reasoning level.
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.
Yichen Jiang