Settings: the model capability fields the schema already supports are not editable in any UI

[m0nk111]

Settings: the model capability fields the schema already supports are not editable in any UI

Summary

The llm-pi-ai provider schema declares per-model capability fields — input (modalities),
reasoningEfforts (level → wire value, or false) and compat — and the schema's own
documentation names "what a configuration UI renders" as one of its concerns. But the entry
exposes no volatile fields to the settings service, so no configuration surface offers an
editor for these fields. Today the only way to set them is editing
profiles/<profile>/cordis.patch.yml by hand (or by script).

Evidence (0.2.0-rc.2, measured 2026-10-04)

• modelFields carries input: z.array(z.union(MODALITIES)) (modalities text/image),
  reasoningEfforts: z.union([z.const(false), reasoningEfforts]) (levels
  off/minimal/low/medium/high/xhigh/max) and compat: compatProfile — for both provider
  models lists and modelOverrides.
• The settings import never migrates the llm-pi-ai section: the write path requires a
  composed entry with volatile fields and refuses it ("no volatile fields"), so the values
  survive only in the renamed legacy document until a hand-run migration writes them into the
  patch layer.
• A configuration-surface save rewrites the patch entry wholesale. Fields the surface does not
  model — for instance per-model input written by a script — do not survive a later GUI edit
  of the same entry, so hand-written capability data is not durable against the UI.

Impact

Per-model vision gating and reasoning-level dispatch require hand-edited YAML. On our
deployment that meant writing input: [text, image] for 34 gateway models by script, and
knowing a GUI settings edit can silently drop it again.

Suggested direction

Expose the llm-pi-ai entry — or a dedicated model-capability sub-editor — with volatile
fields for input, reasoningEfforts and compat, or have a capability editor write
modelOverrides. The schema already validates and resolves every one of these fields; the
gap is purely the missing surface.