Files
OmniRoute/docs/guides/THINKING_BUDGET.md
Praveen K Palaniswamy 65e81158ab fix(ollama): route models by advertised capability (#11088)
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.
2026-08-23 11:45:01 -03:00

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title, version, lastUpdated
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Thinking Budget 3.8.49 2026-08-12

Thinking Budget

Dashboard: Settings → AI → Thinking Budget
API: GET / PUT /api/settings/thinking-budget
Source: open-sse/services/thinkingBudget.ts

Thinking Budget controls whether OmniRoute rewrites client thinking/reasoning parameters on the way to providers. It does not turn compression, routing, or prompt cache on or off.

Modes

Mode What OmniRoute does When to use
passthrough (default) Leaves client fields alone (reasoning, reasoning_effort, Claude thinking, Gemini thinking_config, etc.). Codex / Desktop / any client that should control effort + reasoning summaries. Required for visible thinking panels when the client requests reasoning.summary.
auto Strips all thinking/reasoning fields from the request body before upstream. Only when you deliberately want the provider to invent defaults and you do not need client-controlled thinking. Not “auto-show thinking”.
custom Overwrites every request with a fixed thinking token budget. Hard cap on thinking tokens for all traffic.
adaptive Scales budget from a base effort using message count, tools, and prompt length. Soft token control without fully stripping client intent.

What auto removes

When mode is auto, stripThinkingConfig() deletes (among others):

  • OpenAI / Responses: reasoning, reasoning_effort
  • Claude: thinking, and output_config.effort when present
  • Gemini: generationConfig.thinking_config / thinkingConfig

If a client (e.g. Codex Desktop) sent reasoning: { effort: "ultra", summary: "detailed" }, auto drops that object. Upstream may still bill some reasoning tokens, but often returns empty or encrypted-only reasoning items — so the UI shows no useful thinking stream.

What this is not

Feature Relationship
Compression (Caveman, RTK, stacked, …) Separate pipeline. Works under every thinking-budget mode.
Prompt / semantic cache Separate. Unaffected by thinking-budget mode.
Combo routing / fallbacks Separate. Unaffected.
API-key token limits / cost budgets Separate. Unaffected.
Reasoning replay cache Multi-turn re-inject for strict providers (DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen-thinking, …). Not the same as Desktop “show thinking”.
Decrypting encrypted_content Impossible. OpenAI/Codex private reasoning blobs are opaque. OmniRoute never decrypts them (#7095 / #7176 / #7304).

Visible thinking (Codex / Responses clients)

For a client to show thinking text you need all of:

  1. Thinking Budget mode = passthrough (or custom/adaptive that still leaves summary requests intact enough for the path you use).
  2. Client asks for a summary, e.g. Codex model_reasoning_summary = "detailed" / auto (not none).
  3. Upstream actually streams response.reasoning_summary_text.* (or a non-empty reasoning.summary on the item).

If you only get “encrypted private reasoning”, either:

  • mode was auto (client request was stripped), or
  • upstream returned encrypted_content without summary text (provider limitation; OmniRoute can only surface a placeholder, not plaintext).

API examples

# Read
curl -sS https://localhost:20128/api/settings/thinking-budget \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OMNIROUTE_TOKEN"

# Recommended for Codex / Desktop thinking visibility
curl -sS -X PUT https://localhost:20128/api/settings/thinking-budget \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OMNIROUTE_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"mode":"passthrough","customBudget":10240,"effortLevel":"medium"}'

Schema (updateThinkingBudgetSchema): modepassthrough|auto|custom|adaptive; optional customBudget, effortLevel, baseBudget, complexityMultiplier.

Persistence / restart

Value is stored under settings key thinkingBudget and hydrated at process start (hydrateThinkingBudgetConfig). After changing via DB or some non-API paths, restart the OmniRoute process so the in-memory singleton matches disk.

Operator checklist

  • Codex / Desktop users: mode = passthrough
  • Compression still enabled if you want token savings on messages, not by stripping thinking
  • Do not expect auto to “show more thinking”
  • Encrypted-only summaries are a provider behavior; passthrough cannot decrypt them