Streaming-only providers (glm, MiniMax, gpt-5.x via aigw, Anthropic via
openai-compat shims) emit reasoning through delta.reasoning_content
chunks that get accumulated into the local reasoning_text string — but
never land on the assistant message object as a top-level attribute. The
prior guard at _build_assistant_message only wrote reasoning_content
when the SDK exposed hasattr(msg, 'reasoning_content'), so these
providers persisted the chain-of-thought under the internal 'reasoning'
key and omitted the protocol-standard field.
The poison was silent until the user later switched to a DeepSeek-v4 or
Kimi thinking model, at which point replay failed with HTTP 400:
'The reasoning_content in the thinking mode must be passed back to the
API.' One reported session store accumulated 4,031 poisoned messages
across 1,101 files (#16844).
Fix: add an additive fallback that promotes the already-sanitized
reasoning_text to reasoning_content when no earlier branch wrote it AND
reasoning text was actually captured. Layered on top of the existing
SDK-attr branch and DeepSeek ''-pad (#15250) rather than replacing them,
so every existing behavior is preserved:
- SDK-exposed reasoning_content (OpenAI/Moonshot/DeepSeek SDK) still
wins.
- DeepSeek tool-call ''-pad still fires when the SDK exposes the attr
but the value is None.
- Non-thinking turns with no reasoning leave the field absent, so
_copy_reasoning_content_for_api's cross-provider leak guard (#15748),
promote-from-'reasoning' tier, and thinking-pad tier remain live at
replay time.
- No empty '' gets eagerly written on every assistant turn (which would
have bypassed the read-side ladder and triggered empty thinking-block
insertion in the Anthropic adapter).
Tests: three new TestBuildAssistantMessage cases covering the streaming
promotion path, SDK precedence, and field-absent-when-no-reasoning
invariant.
Credit @Sanjays2402 for the original diagnosis and patch in #16884;
this is a scoped rework that preserves the existing read-side
compensation code as defense in depth.
Refs #16844, #16884, #15250, #15353, #15748.