The word "harder" creates invalid thinking budget configuration

Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Nov 7, 2025 by bukzor Closed Nov 7, 2025

Bug Description

The word "harder" in user messages triggers a conversation-level thinking budget (budget:thinking_budget: 10000) regardless of what other thinking settings are active. This creates mathematically invalid configurations whenever the per-turn limit exceeds 10000 tokens.

Root Cause

"harder" is a text trigger that always sets budget:thinking_budget: 10000, independent of:

  • Whether "ultrathink" (60000 per-turn) is active
  • Whether tab-complete thinking mode (31999 per-turn) is active
  • Any other per-turn limit settings

Broken Configurations

Any message containing "harder" + any high thinking limit setting:

  • "ultrathink" (60k per-turn) + "harder" anywhere → 10k budget (6x exceeded in one turn)
  • Tab-complete thinking mode (32k per-turn) + "harder" anywhere → 10k budget (3x exceeded in one turn)

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Enable ultrathink (sets 60000 per-turn limit)
  2. In a later message, type "harder" (even without "think")
  3. Observe system prompt has both thinking_length_limit: 60000 AND budget:thinking_budget: 10000

Expected Behavior

Either:

  • "harder" should scale the budget based on per-turn limits
  • "harder" should be rejected when per-turn limits exceed the budget
  • Text triggers shouldn't control budget configuration at all

Actual Behavior

The word "harder" creates a hardcoded 10000-token conversation budget that conflicts with any high per-turn setting.

Impact

Users cannot discuss things being "harder" while using extended thinking modes without creating broken configurations.

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