Effort and timeout policy

Caller input wins over classification. When effort is omitted from a skill invocation, calling skill selects low for a narrow mechanical change or focused factual question whose contract is already settled; medium for a bounded implementation, diagnosis, or review with a few interacting decisions; high for cross-file reasoning, adversarial review, ambiguous behavior, architecture, migration, or security judgment; and xhigh only for an unusually broad, consequential task that cannot be narrowed. max is explicit-caller-only. Direct CLI and MCP fallback is medium when no skill performed classification. An omitted model uses target host's configured default because bridge cannot infer locally available model identifiers.

Effort validation

Valid canonical levels are minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. Claude maps minimal to low; Codex accepts canonical spelling only when target model advertises it. A caller-supplied unknown level is rejected before spawning a child.

When supplied supported_efforts excludes a valid requested level, choose nearest lower supported level once and return effort_substituted with requested, applied, and reason. If a stale capability report still yields a structured unsupported-effort failure, perform same one substitution retry for read-only verbs only; a failed write-capable child may already have landed edits, so implement reports fault instead of re-running. Never silently use a host default.

Budgets and retry

Only write-capable operation is implement, with a 600-second soft budget and no automatic retry because edits may have landed.

Soft budgets are advise 120 seconds, review 300 seconds, and implement 600 seconds. Held process receives a hard cutoff at 1.2 times its soft budget. A timeout retries once only for advise or review, at the next lower supported effort tier, because retry keeps same budget and only a cheaper attempt can finish inside it; a request already at the lowest supported tier is reported without retry. Implement never retries automatically because edits may have landed.