A documentation rescan on master moved this README's Testing section out
of the package. This branch was still editing that section, so the
rebase asked which structure wins; master's does, and the branch keeps
only the Catalog resolution section its own change adds.
Re-records the pair fingerprint against the merged text.
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.
The adapter omits the seam's reasoning field whenever a model carries no
reasoning metadata, which is the model's own property and says nothing
about where the model came from. Both the JSDoc and the Agent Note read
as though only hand-declared models were meant, so a reader would infer
that the 251 installed-catalog models pi-ai marks as non-reasoning still
offer their single off level. They do not, and that is the point: a
picker holding only off misrepresents a provider that thinks by default,
because off dispatches the same bytes as naming no effort at all.
Behavior is unchanged; only the prose that describes it was narrower
than the contract. adapter.spec.ts already pins the catalog case through
openai/gpt-4.1 and catalog.spec.ts pins the hand-declared one.
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.
TurnEndReasonMap.error now carries a single `error: LlmFailure` field:
an LlmError keeps its structured facts, any other error flattens to
errorChain text under the UNKNOWN code. Consumers read message/code
directly instead of defending against an unknown union — this also fixes
errorChain() rendering structured failures as '[object Object]' in the
TUI and ACP error paths. Document the turn-stopping contract: a
concludesTurn result never short-circuits already-submitted next-step
work (same-step additionalContexts or racing steering still runs), data
decides.
Two lifecycle holes the registry and the consumer helper left open.
`AdapterRegistrationHandle.replace` had no liveness guard: after the handle's
disposer ran, a replace put routes back into the registry with nothing left to
release them, so the adapter leaked permanently. `owned` being empty cannot
carry that fact, because `replace([])` is the legal empty-section state, so the
disposer records it explicitly.
`installSettingsSection`'s watcher lacked the guard its own disposer carries:
a stored change landing while the consumer unloads reached `onChange`, which
re-registers routes against a fiber whose resources are being released.
Also documents `withFileLock` in the atomic-write README (it claimed one
export), records the age-based lock takeover as a known limitation, and lists
ctx.settings and ctx.credentials in the architecture capability table.
The remaining P1 from the #939 review, plus the P2 it shares a mechanism with.
Nothing carried a version, so two tabs editing one namespace silently
overwrote each other — reproduced as tab B's `reasoning` lost to tab A's
older draft. The seam's per-namespace write queue orders writes; it cannot
tell a fresh writer from one replaying a snapshot a predecessor superseded.
Each namespace now carries a monotonic `revision` over its RAW section. A
write may send `expectedRevision`, checked at the FRONT of the queue (not at
call time, which would race the very predecessor it guards against); a
mismatch rejects with `SettingsConflictError` → `settings-conflict` on the
wire, carrying both revisions. The editor captures the revision it opened at
and, on conflict, asks the user to reopen rather than replaying its snapshot.
The same counter fixes the missing broadcast. `settings/updated` is gated on
the resolved value — correct for consumers, wrong for configuration surfaces:
storing an override equal to the composition base leaves the resolved value
alone while changing what the document says (the field is now overridden, not
inherited) and moving every open editor's revision. `settings/document-updated
(ns, revision)` fires on any raw-section change, in-process or external, and
`host/settings-changed` now rides it.
That event also closes the stale model picker: editing a provider's `models`
changes no route, so `llm/adapters-updated` never fired and an open picker
kept serving the old catalog. A change to an exposed provider namespace now
emits `host/models-changed` too — that namespace holds the catalog.
Docs: both sides of the five touched README pairs, a type-equiv block for
`SettingsPathOp`, and an Agent Note recording what the plane exposes and who
may overwrite what. The deferred wire-redaction gaps (secrets behind
union/intersection/transform, `.default(...)` in the served envelope, schema
text in rejection messages, `new Function` rehydration, pi-ai's `headers`) are
recorded as TODO(settings-wire-redaction) and in Known Limitations rather than
half-fixed.
Five findings from the #939 review, each reproduced before being fixed.
**Configuration reads are as privileged as writes.** `settings.describe`
returns every exposed namespace's configuration and `credentials.describe`
reports whether an arbitrary environment-variable name is configured and from
where — reconnaissance no anonymous caller should have. Both join
PRIVILEGED_METHODS, so the whole configuration plane is loopback-only until
real authentication exists; `trustedHosts` was never authentication. The model
catalog stays reachable: it carries no endpoints or key state, and a LAN
client's model picker legitimately needs it. Asserted over a real HTTP server,
because the Host header a browser actually sends is what decides this.
**The proxy serves only namespaces a registered model provider addresses.**
The settings seam is general — any plugin may register one — but the Web
configuration plane is the model-provider surface. Without the gate, every
future `settings.register()` would silently become remotely readable and
writable configuration. An unregistered namespace and an unexposed one answer
identically, so no caller can enumerate the registry one probe at a time.
**Path-addressed writes replace the redacted-document rebuild.** The editor
reads the REDACTED descriptor, so rebuilding a section from it and replacing
wholesale deleted every literal secret the wire never returned — reproduced as
`{baseURL, reasoning}` in, stored `apiKey` gone out. `settings.mutate` applies
set/unset ops to the section as it stands at the front of the seam's write
queue, and the client names only fields it can see, so an unseen secret is
untouched by construction rather than by care.
P2s in the same pass: `llm/adapters-updated` now contains async listener
rejections (an uncontained one escaped as unhandledRejection, contradicting
the documented "observer failures are contained"); llm-deepseek's retry-policy
swap uses the atomic `registration.replace` instead of dispose-then-register,
which published `[]` then `["deepseek-official"]` so an observer saw the
provider disappear and come back; and a transport rejection no longer strands
the page in `loading` or a card in `busy`, with removal failures surfaced on
the page banner instead of swallowed.
