The entry rewrote every effort before the wire: `minimal -> low`, `high -> xhigh`,
`max -> xhigh`, under a comment claiming flash-server rejects anything outside
{xhigh, medium, low}. The engine says otherwise, in its own 400:
reasoning_effort 'maximum' unsupported; use minimal|low|medium|high|xhigh|max|none
and the harness passes an unmapped level through verbatim
(`compat.reasoningEffortMap?.[effort] ?? effort`, read in the pinned `dist/cli.js`). So the
fold protected nothing and silently changed what the caller asked for. The levels are not
cosmetic either — thinking length on one prompt at `max_tokens 2048`: `low` 766 reasoning
tokens, `xhigh` 614, `max` 1049 with the block closed at 1024.
The map is identity. Two things came out of capturing the wire (scratch HOME + a logging
proxy forwarding :7799 to :7770) that reading the config could not have told me:
- `:off` does not switch thinking off. The default disable mode sends the lowest effort,
so `off` left as `reasoning_effort: "minimal"` — and `minimal` still thinks, a canned
26-token block on every request. `reasoningDisableMode: none-effort` makes the harness
send `"none"`, which the engine honours as a real switch: `reasoning_tokens: 0`, answer
only, no thinking block rendered. Verified after the change, not before it.
- `:max` still arrives as `xhigh`: the harness clamps the requested effort to its own
ladder for this model before the map applies. Recorded in the comment as the engine-side
half of the contract rather than papered over — nothing in models.yml forces it.
Also pinned `top_k: 20` (accepted; the comment claimed the wire matched the server sampler
while `top_k` was never sent, leaving the recipe one env edit away from drifting), and
restored the pre-callsign model ids `frank-medium` / `frank-large` / `frank-small` — the
2026-10-08 rename had replaced the old id inside its own explanation, leaving "renamed
from frank-dragoon" three times and destroying the record needed to resolve an old id.
Verified: full suite green (0 failures), `kb-lint` 0 violations, YAML parses, and the four
efforts `off/high/medium/max` captured on the wire as `none/high/medium/xhigh` with
`top_k: 20` on every request. Refs #62
Frank