Auto Code

• It starts in a higher cost tier that includes stronger coding models.
• It weighs speed more heavily.
• It penalizes failures more harshly, so it course corrects faster when tests fail or the same error comes back.

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How it works

1. Narrow the model pool. Guardrails, zero data retention, model capabilities, provider restrictions, BYOK keys, and your allowed and excluded model lists decide which models are considered.
2. Rate the request. A fast decision model rates the turn, for example what kind of coding task it is, whether the task just changed, how hard it is, and whether a bigger model or more thinking would help.
3. Pick a model and effort. The routing policy weighs measured pass rate, speed, and cost per solved task across models and reasoning efforts, plus live prices and cache status.
4. Route to a provider. The request goes through the same provider routing a direct request to that model would.
5. Carry signals to the next turn. Auto Code favors a change in reasoning effort over a model switch, so it keeps your prompt cache, and switches when failure signals show the model is the problem.

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Usage

curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "openrouter/auto-code",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Add a retry with backoff to fetchUser in api/users.ts"}]
  }'

const response = await fetch('https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.OPENROUTER_API_KEY}`,
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    model: 'openrouter/auto-code',
    messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Add a retry with backoff to fetchUser in api/users.ts' }],
  }),
});

const data = await response.json();
console.log('Model used:', data.model);
console.log(data.choices[0].message.content);

​

Restrict the models

{
  "model": "openrouter/auto-code",
  "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Refactor this module into smaller functions."}],
  "plugins": [
    {
      "id": "auto-router",
      "allowed_models": ["anthropic/*", "openai/*"],
      "excluded_models": ["~anthropic/claude-opus-latest"]
    }
  ]
}

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Change the cost tier

{
  "model": "openrouter/auto-code",
  "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Rename this variable everywhere in the file."}],
  "plugins": [{"id": "jev-router", "cost_tier": "medium"}]
}

​

Inspect routing decisions

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Pricing

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Related

• Model Routing overview: compare the routers on OpenRouter
• Auto Router: the general purpose router on the same engine
• Model Routing Benchmarks: score and cost per task for each router