Give AI_ASSIST_CLEANUP the consumer it has never had: it describes the shape of a classification and decides nothing, so switching it off changes no deletion

common.sh

@@ -2782,6 +2782,52 @@ apply_delete_budget() {
                      _BUDGET_DEFERRED_BYTES _BUDGET_DEFERRED_COUNT _BUDGET_STUCK <<< "$out"
 }
 
+# Asks the local generation model to characterise a block of evidence, for the one line a human
+# would otherwise have to derive by hand. Prints the note on stdout and returns 0; returns 1 and
+# prints nothing whenever anything at all is missing, off, slow or malformed.
+#
+# The contract is that failure is indistinguishable from the feature being switched off, because
+# every caller must behave identically either way. An assist that can block a nightly cleanup is
+# not an assist — so this never retries, never blocks longer than its timeout, and never returns
+# a partial answer for a caller to interpret.
+#
+# Usage: note=$(ai_assist_note AI_ASSIST_CLEANUP "$prompt") && echo "$note"
+#   $1  name of the AI_ASSIST_* flag governing this caller — passed by name, checked here, so a
+#       caller cannot accidentally run an assist its own toggle says is off
+#   $2  the prompt, evidence included
+#   $3  timeout in seconds (default AI_ASSIST_TIMEOUT, else 45)
+ai_assist_note() {
+    local flag="$1" prompt="$2" ai_timeout="${3:-${AI_ASSIST_TIMEOUT:-45}}"
+
+    [[ "${AI_ENABLED:-false}" == "true" ]] || return 1
+    [[ "${!flag:-false}" == "true" ]]      || return 1
+    [[ -n "${MY_ID:-}" ]]                  || return 1
+    command -v jq >/dev/null 2>&1          || return 1
+
+    local u_var="${MY_ID}_OLLAMA_URL" m_var="${MY_ID}_OLLAMA_MODEL"
+    local url="${!u_var:-}" model="${!m_var:-}"
+    [[ -n "$url" && -n "$model" ]] || return 1
+
+    local body out
+    # temperature 0: this is a description of evidence, and the same evidence should not produce a
+    # different characterisation on a rerun.
+    body=$(jq -nc --arg m "$model" --arg p "$prompt" \
+        '{model:$m, prompt:$p, stream:false, options:{temperature:0}}' 2>/dev/null) || return 1
+
+    out=$(timeout "$ai_timeout" curl -sf --max-time "$ai_timeout" \
+        -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d "$body" \
+        "${url%/}/api/generate" 2>/dev/null | jq -r '.response // empty' 2>/dev/null)
+
+    # Reasoning models emit a <think> block before the answer. It is not the note — a log line a
+    # human is meant to skim cannot open with several hundred words of the model talking itself
+    # through the arithmetic. Strip to the last close tag; a response with no block is unchanged.
+    [[ "$out" == *"</think>"* ]] && out="${out##*</think>}"
+    out="${out#"${out%%[![:space:]]*}"}"
+
+    [[ -n "$out" ]] || return 1
+    printf '%s\n' "$out"
+}
+
 # True if filepath's extension (case-insensitive) matches one of the given extensions.
 # Usage: has_extension "$filepath" "${LIDARR_EXTENSIONS[@]}"
 has_extension() {