Pace - Info.plist switch reference (local mode)

See SETUP_LOCAL.md for the full local-mode recipe. This is the canonical summary of the Info.plist switches that control local VLM / planner / TTS / transcription behavior; it was relocated here from the repository AGENTS.md to keep the agent-instructions file lean.

Always-On Companion Mode adds no Info.plist enable switch. Mode, camera, ambient-voice, screen, Mac-context, silent-card, and spoken-intervention choices are explicit default-off UserDefaults managed in Settings → Companion. Companion visual inference still honors LocalVLMBaseURL but validates it fail-closed as loopback-only; it never uses the selected cloud conversational tier. See companion-mode-privacy.md.

Ambient voice has no plist override for its classifier contract. The local Core ML runtime expects the app-bundled resource PaceWakeWordClassifier.mlmodelc with exact labels hey_pace and background. Missing or malformed assets fail closed before Speech.framework or the bounded post-wake conversation can start.

Key	Default	Effect when changed
`UseLocalVLMForScreenContext`	`true`	`false` to skip the VLM call and send the raw transcript to the planner.
`ScreenAnalysisProvider`	`lmStudio`	`inProcess` / `coreML` / `mlx` select the in-process VLM placeholder and currently fall back to LM Studio HTTP until the runtime bridge is wired.
`LocalVLMBaseURL`	`http://localhost:1234/v1`	OpenAI-compatible root for the local VLM. Must be loopback (`localhost`, `127.0.0.0/8`, or `::1`); remote/LAN hosts are refused.
`LocalVLMModelIdentifier`	`ui-venus-1.5-2b`	Must match the model name loaded in LM Studio. 2B GUI specialist; the OCR layer fills in text fidelity the smaller model would miss.
`AlwaysRunLocalVLMRegardlessOfTranscript`	`false`	`true` → bypass the VLM-skip heuristic, run VLM on every turn
`LocalPlannerBaseURL`	`http://localhost:1234/v1`	OpenAI-compatible root for the local reasoner. Must be loopback (`localhost`, `127.0.0.0/8`, or `::1`); remote/LAN hosts are refused.
`LocalPlannerModelIdentifier`	`google/gemma-3-12b`	Must match the model name loaded in LM Studio for the planner role. Gemma-3-12B-it (qat-4bit, ~8 GB) is the eval-validated default (2026-06-12 drilldown: only ≤14B model beating the 4B baseline on clarify + out-of-scope + destructive-confirm); swap down to `qwen3-4b-instruct` for tighter RAM, or `qwen/qwen3-30b-a3b` for stronger multi-step reasoning on 48 GB machines.
`EnableActions`	`true`	`false` → parse action tags but do not execute local macOS actions. Keep `Approve Risky Actions` on when this is true.
`AgentMaxSteps`	`8`	Per-task ceiling for the plan-act-observe loop. `1` disables multi-step (loop exits after first response).
`TTSProvider`	`localServer`	`apple` → always use `AVSpeechSynthesizer` directly. `localServer` uses the Kokoro sidecar with automatic per-utterance Apple fallback.
`LocalTTSServerBaseURL`	`http://localhost:8880/v1`	Loopback-only OpenAI-compatible TTS root (mlx-audio / kokoro-fastapi).
`LocalTTSServerModel`	`mlx-community/Kokoro-82M-bf16`	Model identifier the sidecar expects (`kokoro` for kokoro-fastapi).
`LocalTTSServerVoice`	`af_heart`	Kokoro voice name.
`LocalTTSServerSpeed`	`1.2`	Playback speed multiplier (0.25–4.0).
`PushToTalkShortcut`	`controlOption`	One of `controlOption`, `shiftFunction`, `shiftControl`, `controlOptionSpace`, `shiftControlSpace`. Swap if another global dictation tool (e.g. Wispr Flow) is on the same key.
`TranscriptionProvider`	`whisperKit`	Shipped default. Resolves to WhisperKit when the runtime is linked and its model is on disk, otherwise falls back to Apple Speech (`appleSpeech` / `apple` forces Apple Speech). When the key is unset the factory auto-prefers WhisperKit if the model is already installed.
`PrewarmMailForDrafts`	`false`	Shipped default. Set to any value other than `false`/`0`/`no` (or remove the key) to non-activating-launch Mail at Pace startup, avoiding Mail’s cold-launch tax for the streaming draft path.
`LocalRetrievalFileRootPaths`	empty	Optional comma/newline-separated explicit roots for file retrieval. With no roots, File retrieval records a skipped status and does not crawl the Mac.