On dashboard/memory?tab=engine the Embedding Model quick-select (and the rerank selector) built their lists from a keyword heuristic over the CHAT catalog (AI_MODELS) plus OpenRouter live discovery. Providers whose embedding models are not in that catalog never appeared — mistral, gemini, nvidia nim, groq, vercel-ai-gateway and others that serve embeddings on a standard OpenAI-compatible /embeddings endpoint — and typing such a model by hand failed at runtime with "Unknown embedding provider".
The fix is one generic mechanism rather than a list of per-provider patches: deriveEmbeddingProviderForChatProvider() turns any chat-registry entry with a /chat/completions base into an OpenAI-compatible /embeddings config, with curated EMBEDDING_PROVIDERS entries always winning; the embeddings service resolves a derived config for unknown-but-configured providers instead of rejecting them; deriveRerankProviderForChatProvider() does the same for Cohere-compatible /rerank; and both memory selectors fall back to a free-text provider/model input when no static catalog exists. No provider is special-cased by name, so adding one to the chat registry now makes it embedding- and rerank-capable here automatically.
Verified on the current release tip: merged clean, typecheck:core clean, check:cycles OK across 417 files, and 35/35 across the PR's five new suites (qdrant-quick-select-catalog, memory-provider-listings, rerank-provider-listings, embedding-generic-provider-fallback, rerank-generic-provider-fallback) plus the updated hard-session-lease-bypass-inventory and embeddings-handler.
Note: the base-red disclaimer in the description referenced #9985 against release/v3.8.50 — that window is closed and the current tip carries no open base-red, so nothing was inherited here.
Thanks @rqzbeh — deriving the capability instead of enumerating providers is the version of this that stays correct as the registry grows.
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