Tianyi Cui
e6fad266a6
Define the in-file RFC contract in docs/rfc/README.md § The file format: the header block (`# RFC: <title>` plus a dateless Status enum cross-checked against the lifecycle folder), the per-lifecycle body skeleton (a Problem opener everywhere; Proposal/Alternatives considered/ Acceptance criteria/Risks in proposed/; present-tense Decision/ Consequences with proposal-era headings banned in implemented/; the frozen proposal shape in rejected/), and a mandatory Alternatives considered section with a date-fenced grandfather comment for pre-format RFCs whose alternatives are not reconstructible from the record. Enforce it with a new doc-sync gate, scripts/verify-rfc-format.ts, and normalize all 112 RFCs to it: ~15 Status-line spellings collapse to the enum, 29 Context openers become Problem, the 39 legacy-format XXX debt markers are resolved and banned from reappearing, proposal-era sections in implemented RFCs are rewritten to shipped reality (including the web/fs/subagent seam RFCs' migration plans and test checklists, closing the doc-tiers deferred-work item on the web seam), every RFC gains an Alternatives considered section or the grandfather comment, and the bilingual pair is re-mirrored and re-recorded. Move the generated index tables out of README.md into a fully generated docs/rfc/INDEX.md — gen-rfc-index now writes the whole file, and verify-rfc-classification checks its freshness and rejects index-shaped rows in the curated README — which makes room for the format contract to live in the README front door instead of a separate FORMAT.md. The decision record, and the first RFC written in the new format, is docs/rfc/implemented/process/2026-07-05-uniform-rfc-format.md.
26 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
26 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
# RFC: Two LLM adapters as a design-verification twin
|
|
|
|
Status: implemented
|
|
|
|
## Problem
|
|
|
|
`dsh-llm` owns a provider-neutral streaming vocabulary — the `StreamChunk` protocol (`block-start`, `text-delta`, `reasoning-delta`, `tool-call-delta`, `block-end`, `usage`, `finish`) and the content-block types ([the content-block vocabulary](2026-06-11-content-block-vocabulary.md)). A vocabulary defined against a single adapter risks baking that adapter's quirks into the "neutral" contract: anything the one implementation happens to do becomes the de-facto spec, and the abstraction is unverified until a second provider arrives — by which point the leak is expensive to fix.
|
|
|
|
## Decision
|
|
|
|
Ship **two** adapters against the one contract from the start, deliberately built on different internals:
|
|
|
|
- `dsh-llm-deepseek` — hand-rolled `fetch` + SSE parsing against the DeepSeek API.
|
|
- `dsh-llm-pi-ai` — the same endpoint through the `@earendil-works/pi-ai` library (its own event vocabulary).
|
|
|
|
The rule they enforce: **anything the StreamChunk vocabulary cannot express for BOTH implementations is a core-vocabulary bug**, caught immediately rather than at the next provider. The pair pinned down conventions now documented on `StreamChunk` in `dsh-llm/src/types.ts`: usage emitted before finish, nothing after finish, tool-call `arguments` as raw JSON strings end-to-end, and the two sanctioned error paths (throw from `stream()` *or* end with `finish {kind:'error'|'aborted'}`) that a consumer must handle on both sides — a divergence the library-backed adapter surfaced that a single hand-rolled adapter would have hidden.
|
|
|
|
## Alternatives considered
|
|
|
|
- **A single adapter** — less code and half the e2e cost, but leaves the "provider-neutral" claim unverified; the vocabulary would encode DeepSeek-via-fetch assumptions silently.
|
|
- **A mock second adapter** — cheaper but doesn't exercise a real provider's wire quirks, so it proves little. The twin is real-on-real.
|
|
|
|
## Consequences
|
|
|
|
Double the adapter maintenance and double the key-gated e2e surface (both adapters cover V4 Flash and Pro across representative thinking/effort modes). Bought: a continuously-verified neutrality guarantee for the most leak-prone abstraction in the codebase, and a worked second example for adapter authors. The two share the core Config shape (`apiKey`/`baseURL`/`models`) so a deployment swaps mostly one line, but the reasoning knob differs — `dsh-llm-deepseek` takes `thinking`/`reasoningEffort`, `dsh-llm-pi-ai` takes a single `reasoning` level — so a swap translates that field. If the maintenance cost ever outweighs the verification value (e.g. once conformance tests from [architectural conformance](../../proposed/process/2026-06-11-architectural-conformance.md) cover the contract mechanically), retiring the twin to a single adapter + the conformance kit would be a new RFC superseding this one.
|