`review-lane plan` resolved every cross-AI reviewer lane's reasoning effort by
spawning `query resolve-execution gsd-plan-checker --host <slug>`. The agent id
was a hardcoded literal, so `--host` chose only the argv RENDERING while the
LEVEL always came from the installed plan-checker's frontmatter — `low` under
every shipped model profile. Every prompt-fed lane therefore ran at a fast
structural verifier's effort, and because the rendered argument is a CLI config
override it silently beat the effort the operator had configured for that CLI.
At `low` a large source-grounded prompt makes a model end its turn with no final
message, so the lane came back empty and its stub read as a crash.
Effort is a property of the review, so the lane declares it. Two new fields on
ReviewerLane — `effortConfigKey` (`review.effort.<slug>`) and `defaultEffort` —
carried through each capability manifest and the generated registry, set on the
three lanes with an argv effort channel and null on the other nine. A new pure
`resolveLaneEffort()` resolves config key -> lane default -> nothing, where
"nothing" emits no effort argument at all and the reviewer CLI's own
configuration decides; `inherit` selects that path explicitly and an
unrecognized level falls back to the lane default rather than being forwarded to
a CLI that would reject it. The host's negotiated effortSurface still gates the
rendering, so ADR-1239/#2481's trust boundary holds on this path too. Resolving
in-process also removes up to twelve subprocess spawns per review.
The empty-output stub now names the effort the lane ran at and distinguishes a
clean exit from a timeout kill, a non-zero exit, and a process that never ran —
`status` is null for both a timeout and a signal, so those were indistinguishable
before. The hint is hedged: a clean empty exit is most often a model stopping
short, but it is also consistent with a CLI writing its output elsewhere.
Also: the capability validator now knows both fields, rejects a malformed key or
an out-of-vocabulary default, and rejects a default declared without a config
key (a level the operator could never override). An existing end-to-end row in
tests/effort-surface-axis.test.cjs asserted the old coupling; it now configures
the lane's own key and pins the decoupling in the same real spawn, with the
agent execution tier set to a level that must not appear.
Emitted-Drift-Ack-Growth: review.md — the effort/model resolution-order table this fix adds. The workflow is where an operator looks to find out which knob set a lane's model and effort; leaving the new key undocumented there is the same invisibility that made the plan-checker coupling survive this long.
Emitted-Drift-Ack-Growth: review.md — the effort/model resolution-order table this fix adds. The workflow is where an operator looks to find out which knob set a lane's model and effort, so leaving the new key undocumented there is the same invisibility that let the plan-checker coupling survive.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01CRMEuzNMWn3gs5uUW2ghcF
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: Tom Boucher <trekkie@nomorestars.com>
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