Cron/hook thinking-effort: downgrade only under OAuth proxy

[constkolesnyak]

Problem

Every cron run on Claude OAuth (subscription) fails with:

API Error: 400 level "max" not supported, valid levels: low, medium, high

Root cause: the global agent.thinking=max / agent.effort=max defaults are applied to every session, including cron and hook sessions that run on cron_model (Sonnet by default). Claude OAuth caps non-flagship models at high and rejects max. With a persistent cron session this also poisons every subsequent run on the same sdk_session_id.

The main interactive model (Opus) accepts max, so just lowering the global default would degrade the interactive experience to fix cron. API users (direct ANTHROPIC_API_KEY) accept max on every model and shouldn't be downgraded at all.

Fix

Detect OAuth via config.proxy.enabled — the local cli-proxy-api that wraps Claude Code OAuth credentials is the single source of truth for "running under OAuth subscription" in nerve. Cap thinking and effort to high only when:

• source in ("cron", "hook"), AND
• config.proxy.enabled is True

API users (no proxy) keep their configured value untouched for every source, and interactive sessions keep it under OAuth too — only the narrow OAuth+cron path is downgraded.

Implementation lives in a small _select_thinking_effort(config, source) helper at the session-start path in nerve/agent/engine.py. It composes cleanly with the existing model-aware _effective_effort(value, model) (which already caps Sonnet's effort at high) — this layer also handles the thinking side (which the CLI otherwise rejects as a string-level max) and makes the OAuth trigger explicit.

No new config knobs.

Tests

tests/test_engine_options.py (new, 21 tests, all passing):

• OAuth ON + cron / hook + max,max → ("high","high") (the exact bug being fixed).
• OAuth ON + cron / hook + lower values → unchanged (cap, not force).
• OAuth ON + cron / hook + mixed → each knob capped independently.
• OAuth ON + interactive sources (web / telegram / discord / api / "") + max,max → unchanged (Opus accepts max under OAuth).
• OAuth OFF + every source + max,max → unchanged (Artem's exact requirement).
• OAuth OFF + cron + lower values → unchanged.
• AgentConfig.from_dict({"cron_thinking": "high", "cron_effort": "high"}) silently ignores those keys (backwards-compat for anyone whose config had them).

Files

• nerve/agent/engine.py — _select_thinking_effort helper + single call site update
• tests/test_engine_options.py — new

History

Supersedes #129 — addresses @pufit's review feedback:

This will change the behavior for API users. We should keep it max by default and switch to high when OAuth subscription is used.

The previous PR introduced two config knobs (agent.cron_thinking, agent.cron_effort) defaulting to high and applied them unconditionally — silently downgrading API users. This version detects OAuth automatically via config.proxy.enabled with no new config surface.

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