PR #285 introduced the stderr warning "No --plan and no LLM provider
configured. Using deterministic fallback..." The 2026-04-19 Run 1
agent self-debug said it read that as "I don't have a key, I can't do
LLM stuff, I have to accept fallback" - which is the exact wrong
mental model. The word "provider" referred to the engine's INTERNAL
planner credentials, but the agent parsed it as "I need credentials
to plan at all."
Rewritten to say plainly: YOU are the reasoning model hosting this
skill (Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, Gemini, or any agent runtime);
YOU ARE the planner; you do not need an API key or credentials - you
ARE the LLM. The --plan flag exists precisely so a reasoning model
generates its own plan upstream and passes it to the engine. The
deterministic fallback is the headless/cron path only.
Runtime enumeration is explicit so agents on every supported runtime
recognize themselves - this skill ships to Claude Code, Codex, Hermes,
and ~/.agents via sync.sh.
Tests: updated test_fallback_logs_warning_when_no_provider to assert
the new language (YOU ARE the planner, runtime names present) and
assert the old misleading phrasing is absent. Renamed the companion
test for clarity.
Matt Van Horn
4388fed46a