Question from a noob who’s never used openrouter: how do you actually do stuff with it other than chatting? Their website says it’s a unified interface for every model, but then they show a list of “most popular agents” (not models) that include things like “Codex” and “Claude Code”. Which implies I’m using openrouter to access other agents/harnesses, not just models. At which point what is openrouter doing for me?

I’d naively expect openrouter to be a thing that ships with its own agent/harness and lets you pick the model that requests are sent to. But the website implies that’s not what’s happening.

I can use DS and others through my Kagi sub. The thing about ChatGPT was the integrated environment/memory and the ability to create artifacts, which make it very useful for my job (teaching /researching). I don't use llms for coding, nor for agentic stuff.

Deepseek is truly a dumdum model if you move your full work into it.

For small evaluation ds is impressive.

When looking at the performance / price graph of artificial analysis, we can see that deepseek doesn't seem to have a better profile, just notably worse and slightly cheaper models, so in the future a chatgpt user will be better serve with switching to Luna or Terra that have better profile than deepseek.

Fine tuned DS4F is available from Particle.ai, same price but 20-50% more token efficient: https://openrouter.ai/particle-ai/particle-1

> Definitely have to recommend putting $10 in openrouter and try deepseek 4.1 flash.

I'm pleasantly surprised by grok models.

We use cursor at work and i'm at the $20/month plan.

I used to mostly use Gpt, composer and occasionally opus. But this month i maxed these models quota and I've been working with Grok 4.7 essentially non stop for the last two weeks.

Grok is fairly verbose and somewhat slower but in the end it does get the job done. I've done a surprising amount of work (planning, implementing, tool usage, analysis) on the base plan.