The DeepSeek-V4-flash reviewer was unreliable in production: it pads
its JSON verdicts with internal chain-of-thought even when the prompt
forbids it, so the verdict gets truncated at any reasonable max_tokens
cap and the parser drops it as malformed (a false-negative verdict
that would purge clean rows). A live run on 50 rows reproduced the
failure on 8 of 12 rejections, even at 800 tokens.
Fix: pin the reviewer call to OpenRouter with anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5.
Haiku answers structured-output classification tersely (no scratchpad
preamble), which means a 300-token cap is comfortably above the
~30-token JSON verdict. Cost is roughly the same (~$0.0001-$0.0003 per
review) and the latency tax is smaller.
To enable the pinned-provider call without disrupting other callers,
call_llm grows an optional `provider` parameter: when set, only that
provider is used (no fallback chain). All existing call sites
default to provider=None and keep the chain behaviour.
REVIEWER_MODEL is read from settings via getattr-with-fallback so an
env override can swap models without code changes — useful if we want
to A/B test against e.g. gemini-2.5-flash later.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Giorgio Gilestro
788563a81f