OpenAI root sessions spin: three "silent configuration" defects (effort shadowing, skills-visibility ignores enabled:false, delegate O(agents))

[ramparte]

OpenAI root sessions spin: three "silent configuration" defects

Summary

On a dense personal bundle, an OpenAI root session pinned to the flagship tier at reasoning_effort: xhigh reliably spins — it generates its own review loops, inflates verification far past the ask, and runs one user turn for hundreds of internal tool calls before checking in. Dropping effort xhigh → high fixes the immediate behavior.

But the effort value was the symptom. The deeper, reusable finding is that three independent places in Amplifier apply or inject configuration the user cannot see or turn off, and together they make an OpenAI root session hard to tame. Each is small; each is a "make the invisible visible / honor the off switch" fix. Filing them together because they share that theme and the same root story.

All line references are against the currently-installed builds (amplifier_foundation 1.0.0, amplifier_app_cli, amplifier_module_provider_openai 1.0.0, amplifier_module_tool_delegate, amplifier_module_tool_skills). Happy to split into per-repo issues if preferred.

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Defect 1 — provider-config effort is silently shadowed, with no provenance

What happens. For a ROOT session, reasoning_effort resolution precedence is:

1. settings.yaml / project .amplifier/settings.local.yaml config.providers[].config, merged over the bundle's providers[].config by matching id — settings wins (runtime/config.py _apply_provider_overrides → merge_module_items → deep_merge, child overlay wins; lib/merge_utils.py).
2. Bundle providers[].config — loses to any same-id settings entry.
3. Routing matrix candidate config — does not govern the root's pinned model (matrix only routes delegated sub-agents; commands/run.py --model/--provider handling never consults the matrix).
4. provider-openai module default — ships None for the current family (_capabilities.py).

Why it bites. A user who sets reasoning_effort: medium in a bundle overlay, then pins a model, gets whatever settings.yaml says (often xhigh written by the provisioning wizard) — with no indication the bundle value was overridden. The bundle knob is a dead key. Users reasonably believe they've turned effort down when they haven't.

Proposed fix (small, high value). This is a visibility defect, not a precedence bug — settings-wins is correct (it carries secrets/identity). amplifier_app_cli already walks config["providers"] in effective_config.py; add per-key provenance (bundle vs overrides.<id> vs config.providers[]) and surface it in amplifier provider show. Silent shadowing is the actual defect.

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Defect 2 — the skills-visibility block ignores tool-skills.config.visibility.enabled: false

What happens. The anchors bundle mounts tool-skills with visibility.enabled: false (bundles/anchors/bundle.md). On a session composed from that base, the <system-reminder source="hooks-skills-visibility"> block — a full listing of ~46 skills with descriptions — still appears in the system context every request (~9–10 KB). The module default is True (tool_skills hook), and the false from the mounted config does not appear to suppress the injection.

Evidence. Reproduced on a live session whose composed stack sets visibility.enabled: false at the anchors layer with nothing re-enabling it downstream (verified no overlay in the stack sets visibility). The block is nonetheless present.

Why it matters. On OpenAI at high effort, instruction density is a multiplier — the model spends reasoning budget satisfying an injected catalog it was configured not to see. ~10 KB of every request, unkillable by the documented switch.

Ask. Confirm whether hooks-skills-visibility honors visibility.enabled: false from the composed mount config; if not, that's the fix. (Repro: compose any bundle on anchors, start a session, inspect the system prompt for the skills-visibility reminder.)

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Defect 3 — the delegate tool schema inlines every agent's full description, O(agents) per request

What happens. tool-delegate emits " - {name}: {description}" for every registered agent, full text, unconditionally, into the delegate tool schema — which is re-sent on every request. Cost scales linearly with the number of registered agents, whether or not they're ever called. On rosters that have grown, this is a large, permanent per-request tax.

Proposed fix. Add a listing mode/threshold to tool-delegate (e.g. features.agent_listing: {mode: full|summary|lazy, max_inline: N}): above the threshold, emit name: <first sentence> and expose the full roster via an explicit delegate(list_agents=true) call. This is a genuine scaling property, not a per-bundle config choice. (Owner: Salil Das (@sadlilas).)

Related enabler. To let a general guard warn when a session is pinned to a spin-inducing effort, expose the resolved reasoning_effort on ProviderInfo / provider get_info() (provider-openai resolves it internally at mount but does not surface it). Small addition; unblocks a portable "effort guard" hook.

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Suggested ownership

• amplifier-foundation — config-resolution provenance surface (Defect 1 backend); ProviderInfo.reasoning_effort (Defect 3 enabler).
• amplifier-app-cli — amplifier provider show provenance display (Defect 1).
• amplifier-module-tool-skills — honor visibility.enabled: false (Defect 2).
• amplifier-module-tool-delegate — agent-listing threshold (Defect 3). Salil Das (@sadlilas)

Why one issue

All three are the same failure class: configuration or context that the system applies/injects without the user being able to see it or turn it off. Fixing them is what turns "OpenAI sessions spin unpredictably" into "OpenAI sessions do what the config says." Each fix is independently small and independently shippable.

cc Brian Krabach (@bkrabach) Salil Das (@sadlilas)