If you or anyone else don’t mind, I have a have a question or 2.

I use Claude Pro ($20/m) as a glorified search engine (no ads/SEO) plus simple hobbyist dev things (shell scripts, managing my Mac, apps etc.

I also use it for tasks like - “search the web for top ten selling EVs, put them in a table” and then iterate - pivot tables, charts, additional research”. It could be cars, it could be broccoli. Code Work has facilities to streamline this type of work, but I usually drop into the CLI.

How much if any functionality would I need to recreate if I switch to OpenRouter and would be match my costs with the API approach. I don’t want any cost overruns. With Codex or Claude, if I run of tokens, no big deal, I can wait.

Thanks!

> Many people run local LLMs which is where a mac is useful

Unless you go for the very expensive options, most of the Mac Minis really aren't suitable for running local LLMs, they're painfully slow with prefill/processing input, and the models you are able to run don't handle long context very well, which these sort of long-running agents perform very differently with when you can.

I'll agree with your latter point, hard to beat the value of using something like OpenRouter or similar remote inference.

Even with local models, you can run the agent software and the inference workload on different hosts, which is what I'm doing at home. Beefy server responsible for inference, tiny VM on other server is running the actual agent software + RPC + bridges and what not.

Why not go direct to the source instead of paying an extra 5.5%? Seems like it'd be trivial to have AI wire up connections to your preferred inference providers and save yourself some money over time.