Zero of 25 provider READMEs document any of the four cross-provider primitives, and four providers have had no README for eight cycles

[sroussey]

What

Four cross-provider primitives have shipped since 2026-07: refusal (StreamRefusal), cache checkpoints (PR #641), effort (ModelEffortPolicy, hardened this window by #882), and now pricing (modelPricing, this window). Each landed with tests. None of the four is mentioned in any provider README.

Measured at fb861bb:

$ grep -ril checkpoint providers/*/README.md
providers/aws/README.md          ← unrelated (an SQS visibility-timeout sentence)
$ grep -ril effort providers/*/README.md
$ grep -ril pricing providers/*/README.md
$ grep -ril refusal providers/*/README.md

Three of those four greps return nothing at all. This is the sixth consecutive cycle the measurement has come back the same.

README sizes

anthropic 44   aws 82    bun-webview NONE   cactus 21    chrome-ai 44
cloudflare 113 deepseek 62  duckdb 76       electron NONE  google-gemini 44
hf-inference 44  hf-transformers 44  llamacpp-server 121  mlx NONE
node-llama-cpp 44  ollama 44   openai 44    openrouter 9   playwright NONE
postgres 84    sqlite 33   stable-diffusion-server 125   supabase 33
tf-mediapipe 86  xai 62

• Ten AI providers ship the identical 44-line boilerplate (anthropic, chrome-ai, gemini, HFI, HFT, node-llama-cpp, ollama, openai — install + one example + a link).
• openrouter is 9 lines — thinnest in the tree, fifth cycle, on a provider that is one of only two metered cloud backends with no rate card (OpenRouter fetches per-model rates and drops them in an untyped metadata bag; with no modelPricing its models silently get direct-vendor list prices #910).
• bun-webview, electron, mlx, playwright have no README at all — eighth consecutive cycle. bun-webview had three real backend defects fixed in it two windows ago; electron and playwright are at their eighth static cycle.
• stable-diffusion-server's 125 lines are the second-longest in providers/ and mention neither usage nor the fact that the package emits none (grep -c usage providers/stable-diffusion-server/src -r → 0).

Why this is worth an issue rather than a recurring note

The primitives are the reason a consumer would choose one provider over another, and the per-provider support matrix exists only in this repo's review history. A consumer reading providers/openrouter/README.md today cannot learn that its effort gate now denies non-text modalities (OpenRouter_EffortPolicy.ts:36, new this window), that it reports usage.extra.cost, or that it publishes no rate card.

Proposed fix

1. One generated table, not 25 hand-written paragraphs. The data already exists as code: *_RUN_FN_SPECS[].serves, *EffortPolicy, modelPricing, and a grep -c refusal per package. A script under scripts/ can emit providers/README.md — one row per provider, one column per primitive — and a CI check can fail when the table is stale, in the same spirit as BunExportConditions.test.ts pinning prose against code.
2. A README floor. The four packages with none get the same 44-line skeleton; openrouter's 9 lines get brought to it. Cheap, and it removes the "no README" line from this review permanently.
3. Per-provider prose stays optional — the generated matrix is what carries the contract.

Found during the 2026-09-07 review of providers/. Verified against origin/main @ fb861bb.