Model roles

Settings → Model Roles assigns models by task. An empty task role inherits the nearest configured parent, including its ordered model list:

primary
├── cheap
│   ├── title
│   ├── memory_extraction
│   └── decision
│       ├── goal_judge
│       └── permission_review
└── dream

• title: conversation titles.
• memory_extraction: extract durable facts from conversations.
• decision: shared default for goal completion and automatic permission review.
• goal_judge / permission_review: optional overrides under Advanced decision roles.
• dream: memory consolidation and knowledge-vault lint passes.

Explicit assignments replace inheritance; clearing a task role restores it, including after restart when YAML defines a default. Saving roles updates the running memory extractor immediately; an extraction already in progress keeps its original client. Inheritance selects configuration, not a second retry path after a model fails. Individual callers retain their existing retry behavior. Context compaction still uses the conversation model.

Existing cheap configurations continue to serve title, extraction, and decision tasks. A saved role assignment takes precedence over YAML role defaults. The legacy memory_consolidation_model setting supplies the initial Dream assignment when no explicit dream role exists; Dream otherwise inherits Primary. An explicitly cleared Dream role remains empty on restart, even when the legacy setting is still present.

Vision retains its capability-filtered inheritance from Primary. Embedding, image generation, and TTS require explicit specialist models and have no parent role.