A Z.ai desktop user reported thinking reverting to medium after one turn,
burning ~200% of a week's credits in 4 days despite reasoning_effort: false
in config.yaml. Four compounding bugs:
- _session_info reported reasoning_effort "" for disabled reasoning,
indistinguishable from unset — the desktop adopted it after the first
turn, wiping its sticky "thinking off" pick so every later chat
reverted to the default effort.
- config.set key=reasoning always wrote agent.reasoning_effort to global
config.yaml, so every desktop model-menu selection (preset.effort ??
'medium') clobbered the user's configured value. Now session-scoped
like the messaging gateway's /reasoning, landing on
create_reasoning_override so lazily-built sessions keep it too.
- YAML `reasoning_effort: false`/`off`/`no` (boolean False) was coerced
to "" by every loader's `str(x or "")`, silently re-enabling thinking.
parse_reasoning_effort now treats False/"false"/"disabled" as
{"enabled": False}; loaders (tui gateway, gateway, cli, cron,
delegate) pass the raw value through. The desktop config reader also
crashed on the boolean (false.trim()), aborting voice/STT settings.
- The zai provider profile never sent thinking on the wire, and GLM-4.5+
defaults to thinking ON server-side — so disabling reasoning was a
silent no-op on direct Z.ai, the actual token burner. The profile now
emits extra_body.thinking {"type": "enabled"|"disabled"} for
thinking-capable GLM models, mirroring the DeepSeek profile.
Also: /new (session reset) now carries reasoning_config across the
rebuild like model_override; config.get reasoning prefers the session's
live value and maps a config False to "none"; Settings shows "Off"
instead of a blank select for hand-written false.