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.
The APIs are essentially standardized. You just need to look up how to add another provider to whatever harness you're using. It's a similar thing when you want to try and use local models.
If you search for open source harnesses there are lots of them - I built my own with Claude and have been adding features now with a mix of Claude & Deepseek. It’s still just private for now but you can find others out there! Then you just give it an api key from openrouter and pick a model
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.