An effort the model had never heard of

Reported from a live instance, on Bonsai:

  Jinja Exception: Unexpected reasoning effort high. Supported types are
  xhigh (default), medium, and low.

Effort goes out two ways because no single field works, and the second --
chat_template_kwargs -- is not a parameter the server interprets. It is
rendered into the model's own chat template, which does not ignore a value it
does not know: it calls raise_exception, and the request dies before a token.
So a perfectly ordinary option, drawn by this application in its own menu, took
the whole reply with it.

The vocabulary is per model and nobody agrees. gpt-oss takes low/medium/high.
Bonsai takes low/medium/xhigh and refuses high. OpenAI has added minimal, xhigh
and max at different points, and which of them a given model accepts varies
again. One global tuple was going to be wrong for somebody whatever it held.

A model carries its own list now, and the picker, the slash command and the
request builder all read it. A column rather than a key in capabilities_json,
for the reason context_length is one: that dict is rebuilt wholesale from the
submitted checkboxes on every save.

And it corrects itself. A refusal retries the reply once without the effort
rather than losing it -- safe only because the template renders before any
token, so nothing has been emitted, and there is a guard that keeps it that way
-- then narrows the model's list. Bonsai's error states what it does take, so
that is what gets stored.

Note the parser bug, because it is a good one: "high" is a substring of
"xhigh", so reading the advertised list by substring learned `high` from a
sentence explaining that `high` is the problem. Whole words now, with a test
named after it.

/effort reads its levels off the picker instead of a second copy of the list
kept in the browser.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-25 21:20:06 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent b7bf7d728b
commit 32e2326d41
10 changed files with 382 additions and 21 deletions
+25 -7
View File
@@ -271,8 +271,21 @@
/* --- Reasoning effort ---------------------------------------------------
The command drives the same select the composer shows, so there is one
piece of state and the control updates itself when the command is used. */
var EFFORTS = ["low", "medium", "high"];
piece of state and the control updates itself when the command is used.
Which efforts exist is read off that select's own options rather than
kept here. It used to be a second copy of `["low","medium","high"]`, which
was wrong the moment the vocabulary became per model: a Bonsai takes
`xhigh` and no `high`, so the list the server rendered and the list this
file believed in disagreed -- and the one that decides what `/effort xhigh`
does was this one. The select is the table; nothing else should hold it. */
function efforts() {
var select = el("[data-effort]");
if (!select) return [];
return Array.prototype.map
.call(select.options, function (option) { return option.value; })
.filter(function (value) { return value !== "off"; });
}
function setEffort(rest) {
var select = el("[data-effort]");
@@ -283,12 +296,14 @@
"error"
);
}
var available = efforts();
var listed = available.join(", ");
var wanted = (rest || "").trim().toLowerCase();
if (!wanted) {
return note(
EFFORTS.indexOf(select.value) === -1
? "No effort is being sent. Try low, medium or high."
: "Effort is " + select.value + ". /effort low, medium, high, or off."
available.indexOf(select.value) === -1
? "No effort is being sent. Try " + listed + "."
: "Effort is " + select.value + ". /effort " + listed + ", or off."
);
}
/* "off" is the option's real value, not an empty string: the new-chat form
@@ -296,8 +311,11 @@
sentinel and this has to match it. "default" and "none" still work,
because somebody's fingers will type them. */
if (wanted === "default" || wanted === "none") wanted = "off";
else if (wanted !== "off" && EFFORTS.indexOf(wanted) === -1) {
return note("“" + wanted + "” is not an effort. Try low, medium, high or off.", "error");
else if (wanted !== "off" && available.indexOf(wanted) === -1) {
return note(
"“" + wanted + "” is not an effort this model takes. Try " + listed + " or off.",
"error"
);
}
select.value = wanted;
select.dispatchEvent(new Event("change", { bubbles: true }));