LM Studio's request vocabulary tops out at "xhigh", but Hermes' generic
effort ladder has since grown two stronger levels. "max" and "ultra" miss
the _LM_VALID_EFFORTS membership test, keep the initialized "medium"
default, and are thereby conflated with unparseable input -- so asking for
more reasoning yields less than "xhigh":
high -> 'high' xhigh -> 'xhigh'
max -> 'medium' ultra -> 'medium'
This is drift, not a design choice. The valid set was an exact mirror of
VALID_REASONING_EFFORTS when the file was authored; the ladder then grew
"max" and later "ultra", and the sweep that taught every other provider
about the new levels missed this module -- it has never been touched since
it was written.
Clamp the two stronger levels onto LM Studio's declared ceiling instead,
mirroring the ceiling clamp every other provider already applies. Widening
_LM_VALID_EFFORTS would instead assert that LM Studio accepts "max" on the
wire, which is a provider-side claim this repo cannot verify; clamping
consumes only the ceiling the file already declares for itself.
The clamp is kept separate from _LM_EFFORT_ALIASES because that mapping is
also applied to the model's published allowed_options, which must not be
rewritten. A clamped value stays subject to the allowed_options check, so a
model that does not publish "xhigh" still gets the field omitted and falls
back to its own default -- exactly how a directly-requested "xhigh" behaves.
The regression test asserts monotonicity over the canonical ladder rather
than the two values alone, so the next level added upstream cannot silently
reintroduce the inversion.
