My "AI subscription" is just buying 20$ openrouter credits when I run out and it's costing me less every month then a monthly Claude subscription. 200$ a day is insane
Your data is likely kept and used for training models.
For most businesses, that's a no go. At least at the company I work for, we have to wait for new models because they negotiate away the training and retention and the vendors are not too eager to give up their moat.
What if I don't want my agent to have terminal access though? I get the feeling many people here simply never worked with smaller models, those will confuse cli args really quickly once context expands, and then you have no idea what damage they might do. With MCP's, they get just the access they actually need. Is the Principle of least privilege just not something we want to apply anymore?
CLIs, run in a sandbox as tight as your preferred choosing, live in an ecosystem, where, via pipes and redirection, input and output can be easily manipulated. An agent can do similar things but more laboriously (and less token efficiently) via Python or similar but it would still live in a sandbox somewhere.
Going without the sandbox means hobbling the LLM. It can do things directly but is less able to construct ad-hoc programs to deal with looping, conditionality, tame verbosity, connect tools together, and so on.
It's a choice to not give the LLM an environment. As you say, it can be necessary if you're using dumb models. I don't find it particularly worth the trade most of the time.
If not even OpenAI can properly box in their models I definitely won't trust myself to do so with the very limited time available to me, and instead just use a standard that's already defined, and proven to work.
yeh i tried pi, as a neovim user i naturally like customizability, but with how little i use agents, i want something that just works, which opencode does for me.
How is that a problem that's unique to openrouter? Who's to say when I query the Anthropic API directly, wanting to use Opus, but they determine it doesn' need Opus, route it to Sonnet instead and pocket the difference? The only difference with openrouter is that it's another layer where this type of fraud could occur.
this is a discussion we often have where I work, where we're debating removing a feature due to difficulties maintaining it and few people needing it. I usually fight to keep it, with the argument "we aren't doing it for the people that don't need it, but for the ones that do." But at the end of the day, I'm not the one who has to pay for it.
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