Landed with the design call resolved per the owner's pick — **option 1**: the synced store is now endpoint-agnostic (persistDiscoveredModels and managedModelImport no longer drop non-chat models at write time), and chat selectability moved to read time (auto-pool expansion in autoStrategy applies filterChatSelectableModels; the models-route projection already had its chatOnly filter). Your discovery test now passes end-to-end (3/3): /api/show capabilities persist per connection and image/embedding requests route through the advertising host.
Reconciliation notes: conflicted areas merged onto the current tip (adobe discovery import, requestedModel preflight signature, resolvedProvider fast-path coexists with the synced-route override — explicit resolution wins); carried base-red drains (#10055 memoization, #11071 test variants) dropped as already-landed; the managed-model-import exclusion test was propagated to the new contract (image/video models persist; the read filter still hides them from chat pickers — pinned by a new assertion). Full battery: 205/206 focused (the one red is a confirmed periodic-timer timing flake on the loaded devbox — 20/20 isolated), autoCombo vitest 30/30, combo suites 46/46, gates + typecheck clean.
Thank you @yourspraveen — the capability probe + routing design was right; it just needed the store contract opened up. Fixes#11087.
v3.8.40 cycle integration → main. All test gates green (Unit/Integration/Coverage/Node-compat/Quality-Ratchet). The only red check, 'PR Test Policy', is the test-masking heuristic firing on the cumulative ~57-commit release diff (legitimate assert consolidations already reviewed per-PR — Gemini CLI removal #5246, retired GPT models #5280, provider catalog refreshes); overridden with --admin per the documented release-PR convention. CodeQL/SonarQube advisory scans non-blocking; #5278's code already passed CodeQL on main. Homologated on VPS 192.168.0.15 (v3.8.40 healthy).
Allow image generation requests to omit prompts for models that only
accept image input, and validate required inputs from model metadata
instead of enforcing a text prompt for every request.
Treat authless search providers as executable with built-in defaults so
SearXNG can run without stored credentials, including during provider
auto-selection.
Also align runtime support with Node.js 24 LTS, harden thinking tag
compression and proxy wildcard matching, and update tests for the new
route and runtime behavior.
