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Model reasoning capabilities

docs/design/model-reasoning-capabilities.md

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Model reasoning capabilities

Goal

Expose accurate reasoning controls for common Alibaba Cloud Coding Plan and Token Plan models without inventing effort levels that their Chat Completions APIs do not support.

Research

Alibaba Cloud documents qwen3.8-max with native low, medium, and xhigh reasoning effort levels. It documents qwen3.6-plus, qwen3.6-flash, qwen3.7-plus, qwen3.7-max, and qwen3.5-plus as hybrid-thinking models that can enable or disable thinking, but use an integer thinking budget instead of discrete Chat Completions effort levels.

The registered capabilities therefore are:

Exact model idThinkingEffort control
qwen3.8-maxOptionallow, medium, xhigh
qwen3.7-maxOptionalNone
qwen3.7-plusOptionalNone
qwen3.6-plusOptionalNone
qwen3.6-flashOptionalNone
qwen3.5-plusOptionalNone

Sources:

Design

The model manifest distinguishes tiered reasoning from toggle-only reasoning and continues to match exact model ids. Toggle-only models produce the same ACP configuration option as tiered models, with two values: none and default. Selecting none disables thinking for the live session. Selecting default clears the session override so the existing model or provider default applies.

The daemon marks toggle-only options in ACP metadata. WebShell maps them to an empty effort list, renders only the Thinking switch, and shows Thinking or Thinking Off on the model chip. Existing tiered controls retain their effort rows and labels.

Opening the controls does not mutate generation settings. No provider, authentication, persistence, or runtime-snapshot behavior changes.

Deferred models

DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, and Grok models are not registered here. Their reasoning parameters or defaults vary between direct and Alibaba Cloud endpoints, while the current manifest is keyed only by model id. Registering them before the provider path carries the relevant capability context could display a control whose selected value is not sent correctly.

Qwen aliases, dated variants, coder models, and models with a preset default that differs from the model default are also deferred. They require separate capability or resolved-configuration semantics rather than broadened matching.

Compatibility

Older ACP clients can continue to treat the option as a normal select. Older daemons do not advertise the toggle-only metadata, so current WebShell keeps the controls hidden unless the capability is explicit.