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.
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.
Yichen Jiang