pi-auto-thinking

A pi extension that auto-sets the thinking level each turn via an online prompt-difficulty classifier. The idea is borrowed from oh-my-pi's auto thinking level.

Each interactive turn, before the agent runs, a small classifier model rates the prompt low | medium | high | xhigh, clamps it into your configured bounds, and sets the thinking level for that turn. Trivial prompts stay cheap; hard ones get reasoning budget. Short continuations (continue, yes, ok) return keep and leave the level unchanged. On any failure (timeout, no key, unparseable reply) it preserves the current level and never throws.

The valid thinking levels are never hard-coded — they come from pi's getSupportedThinkingLevels(model), so the classifier only ever picks among levels the active model actually offers.

Install

pi install npm:pi-auto-thinking

Or from git:

pi install git:github.com/aesisify/pi-auto-thinking

Published with SLSA provenance — verify with npm audit signatures.

Configure

Config lives under a pi-auto-thinking/ folder in your pi config root. Project-local config shadows user-global.

• User: ~/.pi/agent/pi-auto-thinking/config.json
• Project: <project>/.pi/pi-auto-thinking/config.json

{
  "enabled": true,
  "classifier": "ollama/qwen2.5:3b",
  "classifierLevel": "off",
  "minLevel": "low",
  "maxLevel": "xhigh",
  "timeoutMs": 8000,
  "maxTokens": 512
}

ollama/qwen2.5:3b is recommended for a local ollama classifier — small and fast enough to rate each prompt near instantly, with no per-turn cost. Pull it with ollama pull qwen2.5:3b. Any cloud model (anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5, openai/gpt-5-mini, …) works too.

field	default	notes
enabled	true	Master switch. false disables the classifier.
classifier	(none)	"provider/model" — pi convention. Unset ⇒ inactive.
minLevel	low	Floor.
maxLevel	xhigh	Ceiling.
timeoutMs	4000	Per-turn classification budget before fallback.
maxTokens	4096	Reasoning-safe cap (headroom for thinking-on models).
classifierLevel	off	Reasoning effort for the classifier call.

Commands

/auto-thinking          # status (default): active, classifier, bounds, last decision
/auto-thinking status   # explicit status
/auto-thinking on|off   # toggle for this session

Config is re-read each turn; run pi's built-in /reload to re-initialize after editing.

A footer statusline shows auto→high (last decision) or auto:off.

Logs

Decision/fallback events are written to rolling log files:

• ~/.pi/agent/pi-auto-thinking/logs/<date>.log

Rotation: daily, max 5 MB per file, keep 14 days.

Tests

Node-native (node:test), no framework. Requires Node ≥22.6 (unit) / ≥22.7 (integration).

npm test                 # unit tests (pure functions + config/logger/paths)
npm run test:integration # extension wiring via a loader + shims
npm run test:all         # both

License

MIT © aesisify