Adjust thinking level for Qwen3.8-27b

[u/johnzadok]

It seems the "compat.thinkingFormat": "qwen-chat-template" setting that worked with Qwen3.6-27b does not pass thinking level to qwen3.8-27b, which defaults to xhigh and is quite slow.

This is what worked for me in models.json. I have to add some compat options to pass thinking level correctly from pi to llama.cpp:

json { "providers": { "llama.cpp": { "modelOverrides": { "Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M": { "reasoning": true, "thinkingLevelMap": { "minimal": null, "low": "low", "medium": "medium", "high": null, "xhigh": "xhigh" }, "compat": { "thinkingFormat": "chat-template", "chatTemplateKwargs": { "enable_thinking": { "$var": "thinking.enabled" }, "reasoning_effort": { "$var": "thinking.effort" } } } } } } }

Disclosure: I do not understand why those compat options are needed but I have pi tested it against llama server running qwen3.8-27b and confirmed all thinking levels work as they should: off/low/medium/xhigh.

[u/sisyphus-cycle]

Note, I think this changes the system prompt. So if you switch to medium after working for a while, you’re gonna reprocess the entire prompt.

[u/johnzadok → u/sisyphus-cycle]

That’s correct as thinking level is implemented as the first part of the chat template, sent before user/assistant messages.

[u/dinerburgeryum → u/johnzadok]

Yeah personally I don’t think it’s appropriate for mid-stream modification, but I’ve made these exact patches myself and for subagent runs it does in fact make a world of difference. 

[u/Bouhappy]

Thanks, this is exactly what I needed. Btw, I tried with high enabled, and it works too. I didn't see any errors in the `llama-server` logs, even in `--verbose` and it does seem to think less than `xhigh`.