Struct ModelSchema 

pub struct ModelSchema {

    pub id: String,
    pub name: String,
    pub provider: String,
    pub family: String,
    pub version: String,
    pub capabilities: Vec<ModelCapability>,
    pub context_length: usize,
    pub max_output_tokens: Option<usize>,
    pub param_count: String,
    pub quantization: Option<Quantization>,
    pub performance: PerformanceEnvelope,
    pub cost: CostModel,
    pub source: ModelSource,
    pub tags: Vec<String>,
    pub supported_params: Vec<GenerateParam>,
    pub public_benchmarks: Vec<BenchmarkScore>,
    pub trust_tier: TrustTier,
    pub deprecated: bool,
    pub available: bool,
    pub weights_ready: bool,
}

The full declarative schema for a model.

Analogous to ToolSchema — describes what a model is, what it can do, and how to access it. The router uses this for constraint-based filtering and cold-start scoring before observed performance data is available.

Fields

id: String

Unique identifier: “provider/model-name:variant” (e.g., “qwen/qwen3-4b:q4_k_m”).

name: String

Human-readable display name.

provider: String

Provider (qwen, openai, anthropic, google, meta, ollama, custom).

family: String

Model family for grouping (qwen3, gpt-4, claude-4, llama-3).

version: String

Semantic version or checkpoint label.

capabilities: Vec<ModelCapability>

What this model can do — ordered by primary capability first.

context_length: usize

Context window in tokens.

max_output_tokens: Option<usize>

Per-model maximum OUTPUT tokens the provider will return in one response. None = unknown; callers fall back to effective_max_output() which derives a fraction of context_length.

param_count: String

Parameter count as human-readable string (e.g., “4B”, “30B (3B active)”).

quantization: Option<Quantization>

How the weights are quantized, if at all. None for remote models and for local ones whose source declared nothing. See Quantization — this accepts the legacy bare-string form on the wire.

performance: PerformanceEnvelope

Declared performance envelope (initial estimate, overridden by observed data).

cost: CostModel

Cost structure.

source: ModelSource

How to access this model.

tags: Vec<String>

Free-form tags for filtering (e.g., “fast”, “multilingual”, “moe”).

supported_params: Vec<GenerateParam>

Supported generation parameters. The inference layer strips any parameter not in this set before sending to the API. Empty = all supported.

public_benchmarks: Vec<BenchmarkScore>

Public benchmark scores as published by the model provider or reproduced on a public leaderboard (MMLU-Pro, GPQA-Diamond, SWE-bench, HumanEval, etc.). The built-in catalog ships this empty — population is a curation step, not a code change. See BenchmarkScore for the field shape and the 0.0–1.0 scoring convention.

trust_tier: TrustTier

How much the project vouches for this model. The built-in catalog is Curated. Deserialization retains the legacy Curated default, so every user-controlled ingestion boundary must call Self::mark_user_registered before persistence or registration. Gates auto-apply (task #8) and this is surfaced in recommendation rationale.

deprecated: bool

Superseded models stay listed if installed but are excluded from fresh recommendations. #[serde(default)] → not deprecated.

available: bool

Whether this model is currently available (downloaded / reachable). Not serialized — computed at runtime.

weights_ready: bool

Whether this model can be used right now, without a download.

Deliberately narrower than Self::available, which for a local MLX model is true as soon as an hf_repo is declared — ensure_local() lazy-downloads on first use, so a declared repo is “functionally available” (see #164). That is the right default for open-ended work and wrong for work on a deadline: a step with a bounded budget that picks a model it must first fetch spends the whole budget downloading and fails. That is exactly how car code’s 120s contract derivation became unusable on a machine with no local weights (Parslee-ai/car#638).

Callers express the requirement with crate::IntentHint::require_ready; this is the per-candidate fact that hint filters on. Recomputed on every registration, so a cached schema can’t carry a stale value.

Implementations

impl ModelSchema

pub fn mark_user_registered(&mut self)

Mark a schema as user-controlled rather than project-vetted.

This is intentionally separate from serde’s legacy default: old built-in and test fixtures omit trust_tier and must continue to deserialize, while models.json, CLI imports, and daemon models.register must never inherit Curated merely because a caller omitted the field or supplied a forged value.

pub fn has_capability(&self, cap: ModelCapability) -> bool

Check if this model has a given capability.

pub fn available_now(&self) -> bool

Live availability for credential-backed providers. The catalog field is a startup snapshot; Settings/OAuth changes must affect the next list and route without a daemon restart.

pub fn cache_rates(&self) -> CacheRates

Prompt-cache economics for this model, derived from its remote protocol. Local / non-remote models have no remote prompt cache, so their cache rates are inert (CacheRates::NONE).

pub fn vendor(&self) -> Option<&str>

The organization whose model this is, when that can be honestly known.

Answers one question — could two models be expected to fail the same way? — so it is deliberately conservative. None means UNKNOWABLE, not “none”, and callers must treat it as “cannot tell” rather than folding it into a count of distinct vendors.

NOT Self::provider, which means four different things depending on which path built the schema:

• curated remote rows — the real vendor (openai, anthropic);
• OpenRouter and the Parslee gateway — the AGGREGATOR, so three vendors behind one gateway all report openrouter/parslee and one vendor reached two ways reports as two;
• a HuggingFace-derived row — the repo ORG that uploaded it, so unsloth/Qwen3 and mlx-community/Qwen3 are the same weights under two “vendors”;
• a discovered local-server row — a guess from the model name.

Only the first is a vendor, so only the first is reported. NOT family either — that is the model line, so claude-4.6 and claude-4.8 read as different and are both Anthropic.

pub fn is_local(&self) -> bool

Check if this model is local (runs on-device).

pub fn downloads_weights(&self) -> bool

Whether this model has weights CAR fetches to disk before it can be used — i.e. whether “is it installed?” is a question with an answer.

Three predicates in this area are easy to conflate, and conflating them is what Parslee-ai/car#894 was about:

• is_local — owned on this machine. True for WindowsSpeech (the OS owns the voices), AppleFoundationModels (the OS owns the weights), and CAR-managed sources. An external VllmMlx endpoint is remote even when its URL happens to be loopback.
• weights_ready — the weights are on disk now. Only meaningful when this predicate is true; for everything else the registry sets it to true as a “nothing blocks an attempt” sentinel, which reads as “installed” if taken literally.
• downloads_weights (this one) — there is something to install at all. Use it to decide whether an install/download status should be reported, then use weights_ready for the status itself.

Rendering weights_ready without this gate is what made windows/speech-synthesis:os claim INSTALLED yes while car doctor said Models: none installed, and made apple/foundation:default and the vllm-mlx/* rows claim INSTALLED no for models that install nothing.

Written as an exhaustive match rather than matches! so that adding a ModelSource variant is a compile error here instead of a silently wrong answer in the CLI.

pub fn has_installed_weights(&self) -> bool

Whether a CAR-downloadable artifact is physically present now. General runtime availability and OS/server-owned weights are not an installation claim.

pub fn decodes_in_process(&self) -> bool

Whether CAR decodes this model in its own process, token by token, through the shared decode loop.

Narrower than is_local on purpose. is_local also covers CAR-managed vLLM-MLX and the speech backends. Those do not spend an output-token budget as this process’s wall clock, so they must keep the remote treatment. Getting that distinction wrong takes the anti-truncation budget away from vLLM-MLX, which is the documented way to get structured tool calls out of a local model. (car#851)

pub fn is_delegated(&self) -> bool

Check if this model delegates inference to a host-registered runner (closes Parslee-ai/car-releases#24).

pub fn is_codex_cli(&self) -> bool

Check if this model runs one tool-free turn through codex exec.

pub fn is_mlx(&self) -> bool

Check if this model uses the MLX backend.

pub fn is_foundation_models(&self) -> bool

Check if this model routes to Apple’s on-device FoundationModels framework. True only for ModelSource::AppleFoundationModels; callers must still verify runtime availability before dispatch (the schema can describe the model on any host, but execution requires macOS 26+ on Apple Silicon).

pub fn is_os_provided(&self) -> bool

Whether the operating system owns the implementation and its memory. These rows have no CAR-downloadable artifact and no local-model memory figure to compare with the admission budget.

pub fn is_vllm_mlx(&self) -> bool

Check if this model uses vLLM-MLX backend.

pub fn is_car_managed_vllm_mlx(&self) -> bool

Whether CAR, rather than an independently managed endpoint, owns the vLLM-MLX child process and its physical weight allocation. The existing HTTP VllmMlx contract remains external/server-owned. A supervised source must opt in explicitly and provide an already-installed local model path in model_name; it is then replaced with a loopback HTTP endpoint only after admission and a successful readiness ACK.

pub fn requires_apple_silicon(&self) -> bool

Whether a CAR/OS-owned model can only run on Apple Silicon (Metal). External vLLM-MLX endpoints own their hardware and are not constrained by the client machine’s accelerator.

pub fn is_remote(&self) -> bool

Check if this model is remote (requires API call).

pub fn all_api_key_envs(&self) -> Vec<String>

Collect all API key env var names for this model (primary + extras). Returns empty vec for non-remote models.

pub fn size_mb(&self) -> u64

Get the size in MB (from cost model or 0 if unknown).

pub fn ram_mb(&self) -> u64

Get the RAM requirement in MB (from cost model, falls back to size_mb).

pub fn cost_per_1k_output(&self) -> f64

Estimated cost per 1K output tokens in USD. Returns 0.0 for local models.

pub fn effective_max_output(&self) -> usize

The per-turn output-token ceiling to use when the caller didn’t specify one. Prefers the registry-declared max_output_tokens; otherwise derives a quarter of the context window, clamped to a sane [4096, 32768] band so a 1M-context model doesn’t request a 250K-token response the API rejects and a tiny 8K model doesn’t get an absurdly small ceiling. (Registry value first, computed fallback second — mirrors a provider lookup with a derived default.)

Trait Implementations

impl Clone for ModelSchema

fn clone(&self) -> ModelSchema

Returns a duplicate of the value.

fn clone_from(&mut self, source: &Self)

Performs copy-assignment from source.

impl Debug for ModelSchema

fn fmt(&self, f: &mut Formatter<'_>) -> Result

Formats the value using the given formatter.

impl<'de> Deserialize<'de> for ModelSchema

fn deserialize<__D>(__deserializer: __D) -> Result<Self, __D::Error>

where __D: Deserializer<'de>,

Deserialize this value from the given Serde deserializer.

impl From<&ModelSchema> for ModelInfo

fn from(s: &ModelSchema) -> Self

Converts to this type from the input type.

impl Serialize for ModelSchema

fn serialize<__S>(&self, __serializer: __S) -> Result<__S::Ok, __S::Error>

where __S: Serializer,

Serialize this value into the given Serde serializer.