From ONE pod, ONE set of weights, behind two aliases:

  qwen38        -> clean answer
  diogene-alpha -> "The user is asking to list hearings from 2026-10-21 to..."

The entire chain of thought went to the client as the answer. Four breaks:

1. THE GATE ASKED THE NAME. _reasoning_active was a regex (qwen3|qwq|
   deepseek-r1|...) over the request's model name: `qwen3` matches "qwen38" and
   not "diogene-alpha", so one alias of one model separated its thought and the
   other did not. It is read from the template now -- whose generation prompt
   ends with '<think>\n', so the model starts INSIDE the thought and emits a
   bare </think>, the form that leaks when nothing looks for it. The regex
   stays as a last resort for a template that cannot be read.

2. THE BUFFERED FORMATTER TOOK NO `reasoning`. Where the thought WAS separated
   it was then dropped: no leak, but no thinking either. litellm's Message has
   no such field, so it is attached after the dump rather than lost -- under
   both spellings, since Qwen's own template reads `reasoning_content`.

3. THE PROXY HOP CARRIED NEITHER FORM. Buffered, the remote sends
   reasoning_content beside an already-cleaned content, which the string
   contract cannot hold: get_last_reasoning(), like get_last_tool_calls().
   Streamed, it sends reasoning DELTAS, and dropping them meant a client saw
   nothing at all until the answer began -- so the <think>/</think> tags go
   back on as they arrive and the caller's existing reasoning gate splits them
   live. An all-thinking stream leaves the tag open on purpose: the gate
   flushes an unclosed thought as reasoning, and there is no content for a
   close tag to precede.

4. THINKING COULD NOT BE TURNED OFF. enable_thinking defaulted to False, so
   "unset" and "explicitly off" were the same value, and the field sat in
   _CHAT_CONSUMED_FIELDS while no backend forwarded it. It defaults to None
   now: unset sends nothing and the model keeps its own default (a thinking
   model thinks), an explicit value travels as chat_template_kwargs. That
   needed the POD backend to gain passthrough at all -- the local vLLM backend
   has forwarded unknown fields for releases, a pod got none of them, so
   chat_template_kwargs could never reach a pod-served model.

ChatMessage silently dropped `reasoning_content`, so a previous turn's thinking
never reached the template that re-renders it inside <think>. Accepted and
forwarded now.

The chat page hardcoded stream:false, so thinking could never arrive live
there, and it read only message.content. It has `stream` and `thinking`
toggles (both on), renders the thought in a block that fills AS IT ARRIVES and
collapses when the answer starts, and keeps it in the history it replays.
Streaming is the request's choice, not forced: cleared, it takes the buffered
path exactly as before.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S8LAP3ueNzQJtwzhgVbq66