aaif-goose/goose · error

Missing thinking signature

Error message

Missing thinking signature

What it means

The second required field of a Snowflake Cortex thinking block: signature, the cryptographic proof string that lets the API accept the reasoning on the next turn. If a type "thinking" block has thinking text but its signature key is missing or not a string, response_to_message fails with 'Missing thinking signature'.

Source

Thrown at crates/goose-provider-types/src/formats/snowflake.rs:272

                    .to_string();

                let input = content
                    .get("input")
                    .ok_or_else(|| anyhow!("Missing tool input"))?
                    .clone();

                let tool_call = CallToolRequestParams::new(name).with_arguments(object(input));
                message = message.with_tool_request(id, Ok(tool_call));
            }
            Some("thinking") => {
                let thinking = content
                    .get("thinking")
                    .and_then(|t| t.as_str())
                    .ok_or_else(|| anyhow!("Missing thinking content"))?;
                let signature = content
                    .get("signature")
                    .and_then(|s| s.as_str())
                    .ok_or_else(|| anyhow!("Missing thinking signature"))?;
                message = message.with_thinking(thinking, signature);
            }
            Some("redacted_thinking") => {
                let data = content
                    .get("data")
                    .and_then(|d| d.as_str())
                    .ok_or_else(|| anyhow!("Missing redacted_thinking data"))?;
                message = message.with_redacted_thinking(data);
            }
            _ => {
                // Ignore unrecognized content types
            }
        }
    }

    Ok(message)
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 3810898a74)

Solutions

1. Confirm the raw block includes a string "signature" field
2. If signatures are being scrubbed by a logging/privacy layer, exclude thinking blocks from scrubbing — the signature is required for multi-turn reasoning
3. Fix fixtures to include a signature value (any non-empty string for tests)
4. For endpoints without signature support, skip such blocks rather than failing the whole response

Example fix

// before
let signature = content
    .get("signature")
    .and_then(|s| s.as_str())
    .ok_or_else(|| anyhow!("Missing thinking signature"))?;

// after - degrade to a text block instead of failing the conversion
let signature = match content.get("signature").and_then(|s| s.as_str()) {
    Some(s) => s,
    None => {
        tracing::warn!("thinking block without signature; keeping text only");
        message = message.with_text(thinking.to_string());
        continue;
    }
};

for block in content_list {
    if block.get("type").and_then(|t| t.as_str()) == Some("thinking")
        && block.get("signature").and_then(|s| s.as_str()).is_none()
    {
        anyhow::bail!("thinking block without string signature: {block}");
    }
}

fn thinking_block_has_signature(block: &serde_json::Value) -> bool {
    if block.get("type").and_then(|t| t.as_str()) != Some("thinking") {
        return true;
    }
    block.get("signature").and_then(|v| v.as_str()).is_some()
}

match response_to_message(&response) {
    Ok(msg) => msg,
    Err(err) if err.to_string().contains("Missing thinking signature") => {
        tracing::warn!("thinking without signature cannot round-trip; dropping: {err}");
        Message::assistant()
    }
    Err(err) => return Err(err),
}

When it happens

Trigger: A thinking block like {"type":"thinking","thinking":"..."} with no signature — typical of gateways that strip signatures for size, of fixtures that only model the text, or of schema variants where the signature lives one level up.

Common situations: Recording/replaying Cortex traffic with signatures redacted (they look like secrets and get scrubbed); prompt/response transformation layers trimming long fields; API schema drift moving signature elsewhere.

Related errors

• Missing thinking content
• Missing redacted_thinking data
• Missing tool_use id
• Missing tool_use name
• Missing tool input

AI-assisted analysis of aaif-goose/goose@3810898a74 (2026-08-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/e3ad772ac2ecb036. Report an issue: GitHub.