voyage/docs/profiles.md

# Profile system — voyage v4.1

This document describes the model profile system: built-in tiers,
lookup precedence, custom-profile authoring, drift detection, and
cost estimation (with disclaimer).

## Built-in profiles

Four pre-defined tiers ship with the plugin (fable added in v5.9), located at
`lib/profiles/{economy,balanced,premium,fable}.yaml`.

| Profile | Brief | Research | Plan | Execute | Review | Continue | Use case |
|---------|-------|----------|------|---------|--------|----------|----------|
| `economy` | sonnet | sonnet | sonnet | sonnet | sonnet | sonnet | ⚠ **Experimental** (uncalibrated Jaccard floor) — lowest cost; small-scope tasks where you have high confidence the brief is right |
| `balanced` | sonnet | sonnet | opus | sonnet | opus | sonnet | Mixed — opus where reasoning depth pays off (plan synthesis + adversarial review); opt-in via `--profile balanced` |
| `premium` (default) | opus | opus | opus | opus | opus | opus | Maximum quality — Opus on every phase + external research on (default since the 2026-05-13 operator decision) |
| `fable` | fable | fable | fable | fable | fable | fable | Max quality — Fable 5 (Mythos-class, above Opus) on every phase; opt-in via `--profile fable`; reasoning effort inherits from the session (see Model & effort axes) |

`premium` is the default tier — set by the 2026-05-13 operator decision and
matched by the hardcoded resolver default in `lib/profiles/resolver.mjs`. It
runs opus on every phase and turns external research on: maximum quality, at
roughly 5× the sub-agent cost of an all-sonnet run, accepted as a deliberate
trade-off. Drop to `--profile balanced` (opus only on the two phases where
quality matters most — Plan synthesis + Review — and sonnet everywhere else)
or `--profile economy` (sonnet everywhere) when cost or latency matters more
than depth. Step up to `--profile fable` (Fable 5 on every phase) when
maximum quality is wanted end-to-end and cost is not a constraint.

`economy` is *strictly experimental* in v4.1, and says so in the profile
data itself: `lib/profiles/economy.yaml` carries `experimental: true`. The
cross-tier Jaccard floor (0.55) is grounded in parked-synthetic fixtures, not
empirical runs (Step 17 calibration was deferred — see
`tests/synthetic/profile-jaccard-calibration.md`). The flag is pinned: it must
stay `true` while the calibration status is `parked-synthetic`, and must be
dropped in the same change that lands empirical calibration
(`status: empirical`). If you observe economy-plan quality regressions, fall
back to `balanced`.

## Model & effort axes

`opus`, `sonnet`, and `fable` are model **aliases**, not pinned ids. As of
Claude Code 2.1.154 the `opus` alias resolves to **Opus 4.8**, whose default
reasoning effort is **`high`**; `sonnet` resolves to Sonnet 4.6; `fable`
resolves to **Fable 5** (Mythos-class, positioned above Opus), whose default
reasoning effort is also `high`. The profile table above selects *which
alias* runs each phase — it does not touch reasoning effort.

**Reasoning effort inherits from the session.** Voyage effort (orchestration
shape — which agents/passes run) and model reasoning effort are different
axes. Fable 5's default reasoning effort is `high`, NOT xhigh, and switching
model resets effort to the model default — xhigh does not follow the model.
To run the fable tier at xhigh, set it at session level: `/effort xhigh`, the
`effortLevel` setting, or `CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL`.

Two different things share the word "effort" in Voyage. They are **orthogonal
axes** — same name, different mechanism:

| | **Orchestration effort** | **Reasoning effort (native)** |
|---|---|---|
| Where | brief `phase_signals.effort`, consumed by command prose | native Claude Code `effort:` in agent frontmatter |
| Values | `low` / `standard` / `high` | `low` / `medium` / `high` / `xhigh` / `max` |
| Controls | *which agents/passes/gates run* (swarm cardinality, gate strictness, sequential-vs-parallel) | *per-spawn reasoning-token budget* the harness gives one agent |
| `low` means | "run fewer agents" (the `--quick`-equivalent code-path) | "think with a smaller budget" |
| Applied by | Voyage command logic | the harness, at spawn time |

The `phase-signal-resolver.mjs` helper only reads the **orchestration** axis
(`phase_signals.effort`, gated against `low/standard/high`) plus the optional
per-phase `model` (gated against `['sonnet','opus','fable']`). It never emits
native `effort:`.

**Native `effort:` on agents.** Voyage sets the reasoning axis statically on
selected agents, additively over the Opus-4.8 default:

- **Retrieval agents → `medium`:** `task-finder`, `git-historian`,
  `dependency-tracer`, `architecture-mapper` (structured discovery, not deep
  multi-step reasoning).
- **Adversarial-reasoning agents → `high`:** `plan-critic`, `risk-assessor`,
  `contrarian-researcher`, `review-coordinator` (synthesis and stress-testing
  where reasoning depth pays off).
- **All other agents:** unset → inherit the model default (Opus 4.8 = `high`).

Native-effort precedence (harness): env `CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL` > frontmatter
`effort:` > session setting > model default. `MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=0` (or
`--thinking disabled`) overrides effort entirely. Enterprise `availableModels`
constrains the *model* alias only — it does **not** bound effort.

## Decision tree

```
Are you uncertain whether the brief is correctly framed?
  └── Yes → premium (opus on brief + plan + review)
  └── No  → continue
            ↓
Is the change small (≤ 5 steps in the plan)?
  └── Yes → economy (sonnet everywhere)
  └── No  → balanced (opus on plan + review)

Special cases:
  - Critical-infrastructure plan          → premium
  - Migration with rollback risk          → premium
  - Research-heavy task (≥ 4 dimensions)  → balanced (research-stage benefits)
  - Bug fix with clear reproducer         → economy
  - Documentation-only PR                 → economy
```

## Lookup order

Voyage resolves the profile in this priority order:

1. **Explicit `--profile <name>` flag** — passed to the command
2. **Plan-file frontmatter `profile:`** — when resuming via
   `/trekexecute --resume` or `/trekcontinue`
3. **`VOYAGE_PROFILE` environment variable** — useful for headless CI
4. **Default `premium`** — final fallback

The resolved value is recorded in two places:

- Plan-file frontmatter `profile: <name>` and `phase_models: [...]`
- Stats stream `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}/trek*-stats.jsonl` —
  `profile`, `profile_source`, `phase_models`, `model_used`,
  `phase_models_resolved` fields

`profile_source` distinguishes how the profile was resolved (`flag` /
`plan_frontmatter` / `env` / `default`), so dashboards can surface
unexpected env-var inheritance in CI.

## Custom profiles

Drop a YAML file at `lib/profiles/<name>.yaml` to define a new tier.
The validator (`lib/validators/profile-validator.mjs`) enforces:

- Every `phase_models[].phase` must be a known phase enum:
  `brief` / `research` / `plan` / `execute` / `review` / `continue`
- Every `phase_models[].model` must exactly match an entry in
  `BASE_ALLOWED_MODELS` (`['sonnet', 'opus', 'fable']` in
  `lib/validators/profile-validator.mjs`; `haiku` only with
  `VOYAGE_ALLOW_HAIKU=1`)
- All six phases must be present (no partial profiles)

The four built-in names (`economy`, `balanced`, `premium`, `fable`) resolve to their
bundled yaml first — `findProfilePath()` returns the built-in before consulting
`voyage-profiles/`, so a same-named custom file is ignored and cannot shadow a
built-in. To customize, give your profile a new name and reference it via
`--profile <new-name>` or `VOYAGE_PROFILE=<new-name>`.

### Example custom profile

```yaml
# lib/profiles/critical.yaml — opus everywhere except continue
phase_models:
  - phase: brief
    model: opus
  - phase: research
    model: opus
  - phase: plan
    model: opus
  - phase: execute
    model: opus
  - phase: review
    model: opus
  - phase: continue
    model: sonnet
```

Validate with: `node lib/validators/profile-validator.mjs --json lib/profiles/critical.yaml`

## Drift detection

In `--strict` mode, `plan-validator.mjs` emits a `MANIFEST_PROFILE_DRIFT`
warning when the plan-level `profile:` differs from any step manifest's
`profile_used`. The warning is a *signal*, not a failure — the plan
remains `valid: true`. This catches:

- Manual edits where an operator changed a single step's profile
- Resume from a partial run where the previous session used a different
  tier
- Copy-paste errors when stitching plan fragments

To suppress the warning intentionally (e.g. when a critical step
genuinely needs a higher tier), document the override in the step's
prose and re-run with `--soft` to validate without strict-mode warnings.

## Cost estimation

> **Disclaimer:** the table below is an *anslag*, not a contractual
> SLA. Real cost depends on context size, agent-swarm cardinality,
> tool-use density, and Claude Code billing schedule. Treat these as
> rough order-of-magnitude.

| Profile | Brief | Research | Plan | Execute | Review | Total |
|---------|-------|----------|------|---------|--------|-------|
| `economy` | $0.10–0.50 | $0.50–2.00 | $0.50–2.00 | $1.00–5.00 | $0.20–1.00 | **$2–10** |
| `balanced` | $0.10–0.50 | $0.50–2.00 | $1.00–4.00 | $1.00–5.00 | $0.50–2.00 | **$3–14** |
| `premium` | $0.50–2.00 | $0.50–2.00 | $1.00–4.00 | $1.00–5.00 | $0.50–2.00 | **$4–15** |

Numbers are per *full pipeline run* (brief + research + plan +
execute + review) on a moderate-complexity task. Numbers scale roughly
linearly with the size of the resulting plan (10 steps ≈ baseline; 30
steps ≈ 3× the execute column).

Per-profile actuals are emitted to JSONL stats — pipe them through the
OTel export (`docs/observability.md`) to get real cost-attribution
graphs in Grafana. Replace the table above with your own measured
numbers after ≥ 3 runs of each profile.

## Deferred to v4.2

- **`balanced.external_research_enabled` operator-override** —
  v4.1 omits this per scope-guardian SG2. v4.2 may add an opt-in
  flag to enable external research agents in the balanced tier
  without forcing premium.
- **Empirical Jaccard re-calibration** — parked-synthetic fixtures
  in v4.1 use a 0.55 conservative starting threshold. v4.2 plans an
  empirical re-run with $60-120 LLM budget to derive a calibrated
  threshold from real economy-vs-premium plan pairs.
- **ROUGE-L + char-4gram MinHash** as primary/secondary cross-tier
  gates per research/02 Recommendation #7. Jaccard remains the gate
  in v4.1; v4.2 may layer ROUGE-L on top.

## See also

- [`README.md` § Profile system](../README.md) — top-level overview
- [`CLAUDE.md` § Profile system](../CLAUDE.md) — internal reference
- [`docs/observability.md`](observability.md) — JSONL → OTel pipeline
- [`tests/synthetic/profile-jaccard-calibration.md`](../tests/synthetic/profile-jaccard-calibration.md)
  — calibration status and threshold rationale
- [`lib/profiles/`](../lib/profiles/) — built-in profile YAMLs
- [`lib/validators/profile-validator.mjs`](../lib/validators/profile-validator.mjs)
  — schema validator with CLI shim