Route selection sniffed model names: anything starting "claude-" or
"anthropic/" took the vendor-native passthrough, everything else took the
normalized route. That works only while an alias names its vendor. A
semantic role alias like "remote-architecture" is meant to point at
Anthropic today and somewhere else tomorrow, and the name says nothing
either way -- so it would have taken the normalized route regardless of
what was behind it, silently losing the fidelity A13 wants for delegations.
LiteLLM already knows the answer. /model/info reports each alias's backing
model, provider, and declared tool support, so the agent asks at startup and
routes on the provider it discovers. That keeps vendor knowledge where A5
already put it -- in the proxy -- rather than duplicating it as name patterns
here.
There is deliberately no name-based fallback: PASSTHROUGH_PREFIXES and
has_native_adapter are gone, and select_client now requires a catalog. A
second heuristic could only ever disagree with the proxy. An unknown model
raises instead of guessing a route.
Misconfiguration is therefore loud and early. build_agent validates every
role against the catalog before it clones anything, naming all the bad ones
at once. Discovery is per key -- /model/info returns only what the presented
token may use -- so the same check catches a role pointed at a real model
this key cannot reach. An unreachable proxy is reported separately, since an
outage and a typo call for different responses from the operator.
Two things now get recorded rather than inferred: the resolved model is
pinned alongside the role mapping at task start, for the reason A11 already
pins roles, and DelegationStarted carries backing_model so A16 eval history
is not averaged across whatever an alias happened to point at.
A model LiteLLM declares tool-less warns at startup rather than refusing;
A15 expects weak local models to be accommodated, and they are observed
driving tool loops anyway.
Verified live: all four aliases the production key can see route correctly
through discovery, and each chosen route works.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An exhausted budget was a special case of something more general: the
work is not at fault. A network blip, a timeout, a 5xx from the proxy,
or a rate limit that did not clear all leave a delegation branch that
may be perfectly good, and discarding it would throw away work for a
reason that has nothing to do with the work.
UpstreamUnavailable now names that family, with BudgetExhausted a
member of it — distinguishable where the difference matters, since a
budget will not clear within the hour while a network blip will. A
delegation stopped by any of them is "interrupted": branch kept,
intent left pending, and A3's resume rule picks it up.
The benefit of the doubt stops at the server's own door. A 4xx that is
not a rate limit means the request itself was wrong, and preserving
branches on the strength of one would hide a real bug — so those still
fail and clean up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Measuring Opus found a bug that had been silent all along: nothing
checked stop_reason or finish_reason, so a response cut off mid-answer
was parsed as a complete one.
The symptom was a submit_plan tool call whose required `content` field
was simply absent — structurally valid, substantively empty, and
indistinguishable from a model that chose to send nothing. The cause
was our max_tokens of 4096: Opus writing an architecture plan
routinely spends 3,000-4,000 output tokens, and was observed at 4,064
against that ceiling. Roughly one run in three crossed it.
Worse than the empty plan is what the same failure does elsewhere: a
truncated write_file writes half a file and reports success.
- Both routes now raise TruncatedResponse when the model was cut off.
It subclasses LLMError, so the planner's retry and the executor's
and delegation's gating already handle it without learning a new
type: a cut-off turn is a failed turn
- The default ceiling is 16384 and configurable via
NISSE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS. Output is billed by what is produced, not
by the ceiling, so a low limit buys nothing and costs silent
truncation
Verified: three consecutive Opus planning turns now return plans of
5,700-6,200 characters where one in three previously returned nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The arrival of non-Anthropic models made a latent bug observable: the
delegate's client was hardcoded to the Anthropic passthrough, so
pointing NISSE_ROLE_DELEGATE at gpt-6-astra or a local model would
have sent Anthropic-shaped /v1/messages bodies to something that does
not speak them. A5 promises the frontier tier is swappable "as a
configuration change, not a refactor", and it was not.
select_client now picks the route from the model: the vendor-native
adapter where one exists, LiteLLM's normalization otherwise — which is
exactly what A13 prescribes for a vendor whose renderer adapter has
not been written, pending validation against the A16 eval set.
Also adds the capability matrix Part H asks for. It says the
thresholds that depend on local capability — A12's failure count,
A14's consult budget, A15's manifest size — must be tuned "on the real
hardware", and that needs measurement rather than reputation. The
harness probes each model for the things that actually break: whether
it calls a tool at all, whether the plan it submits has substance
(llama3.2 emitted "{"), whether it can consume its own tool result,
and whether prompt-level JSON holds. Opt in with
NISSE_CAPABILITY_MODELS; it spends real tokens across several models.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CI failed on the delegation branch with a 429 from the proxy: token
limit 200000, 17399 remaining. Not a defect — the live delegation
tests are token-hungry, and every push to a PR branch fired two
identical suites concurrently, since the push and pull_request events
both matched.
- Push now only triggers on main. A PR branch is already covered by
the pull_request event, so this halves both the wall time and the
tokens spent per branch
- A 429 is retried once before being surfaced. Losing a ten-turn
delegation to a transient limit wastes far more than waiting out
the window, and retrying forever would hide a real ceiling. The
sleep is injectable, so the existing 429 test no longer waits 20
seconds for real
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- planner.py: LLMPlanningAgent offers exactly two tools, submit_plan
and ask_human, so gating stays structural at the tool layer; no
proceed tool exists. System prompt requires explicit, low-inference
plans because a weaker model executes them (A13)
- Model output is appended to the canonical log as it arrives, before
being interpreted, so a crash mid-planning leaves a truthful
transcript
- A bad turn (prose instead of a tool call, malformed arguments, or a
failed call) retries once, then raises PlanningError; the
orchestrator gates to AWAIT_INPUT rather than inventing a plan
- Orchestrator: appends every operator message, plan_submitted, and
gate_opened to the transcript, so re-planning sees rejection
feedback as conversation rather than out-of-band parameters; pins
the A11 role mapping at task start
- llm.py: non-JSON or non-object tool arguments now raise LLMError
instead of escaping as JSONDecodeError — observed from llama3.2,
which emits truncated argument strings
- Live planning test is opt-in on NISSE_LIVE_PLANNER_MODEL: planning
escalates unconditionally (A12) and the local model does not hold
the tool-call contract, so it awaits a frontier route
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PR 2 of the steps-3/4 plan.
- llm.py: LLMClient protocol — complete(events, tools, model) ->
canonical events — present from the first real LLM call.
LiteLLMClient renders requests via the A10 renderer, targets the
proxy's OpenAI-compatible route, and maps provider tool-call IDs
to locally-minted canonical IDs at the boundary
- RoleMap (A11): executor/planner/delegate/consultant resolved from
env; pinned() returns the mapping to record at task start
- Config strictly from env: NISSE_LLM_BASE_URL, NISSE_LLM_TOKEN;
envfile.py is a minimal .env loader where real env wins; .env now
gitignored with a committed .env.example documenting all variables
(Matrix ones included for the upcoming transport PR)
- Live smoke test against the proxy is integration-marked and skips
without credentials — CI stays credential-free per operator
decision; the test runs locally once .env exists
- httpx added as nisse-dev's HTTP client
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
dongarandClaude Opus 5