Effort joins model as a mandatory pin: an omitted field inherits the
session effort, coupling every dispatch's thinking budget to whatever
the user happens to be chatting at (often xhigh) — the same
session-state coupling the model pin removes. The assignment follows
the model split:
- xhigh on every opus agent (judgement roles are the pipeline's
quality floor and must not degrade with the session);
- high on every sonnet agent (tightly-scoped plan execution gains
little from xhigh but pays its latency per dispatch, and these are
the per-task in-loop roles — wall-clock is the efficiency metric;
not lower than high, since re-loops cost more than saved thinking);
- medium inline in the workflow scripts for schema-bound
extraction/verification stages that author no code (preflight,
plan-extract, mini-verify, tree-check, finalize, build/suite
verify).
Workflow agent() calls pass effort explicitly on every call — whether
frontmatter effort propagates through an agentType dispatch is
undocumented, so the scripts do not rely on it. Policy documented in
docs/agent-template.md § effort, mirroring § model.
Brummel
edbbb68f97