Everyone agrees you should use the best model. But the current infrastructure makes this impossible.
Look at what actually exists: the leading harnesses offer a handful of models. Open-weight and non-frontier models sit unused. Attempts to aggregate models discount complexity and fail to accommodate user diversity.
The solutions come in two forms, and both are incomplete
The first asks you to move to a new app, a new workspace, or ecosystem. But the best developers we know change tools constantly, because the best place to work keeps changing. Any solution that requires relocation is betting against how engineers actually behave.
The second comes with a value tax, either charging for using your API keys, taxing and controlling how you use the product, or making assumptions around how you should use models that interfere with flexible deployment. Things that were frustrating to us were down-routing to models we hadn’t requested when they weren’t available. Making routing claims that don’t hold, getting detailed caching reasoning and traces, or controlling how we can use the tools, hooks, and mcps that we want to in the places we wanted to work from.
We fixed it by building a truly universal pipe
Cloud models, self-hosted models, custom models, your own keys, the hardware under your desk: it all connects the same way, and bringing your own costs nothing. We figured out how to bring models to the apps you already operate in without changing the setup and assumptions around your work.
We’re really excited to build this with you and want to make everything we can open source and maintained by the community.
Everyone agrees you should use the best model. But the current infrastructure makes this impossible. Look at what actually exists: the leading harnesses offer a handful of models. Open-weight and non-frontier models sit unused. Attempts to aggregate models discount complexity and fail to accommodate user diversity. The solutions come in two forms, and both are incomplete The first asks you to move to a new app, a new workspace, or ecosystem. But the best developers we know change tools constantly, because the best place to work keeps changing. Any solution that requires relocation is betting against how engineers actually behave. The second comes with a value tax, either charging for using your API keys, taxing and controlling how you use the product, or making assumptions around how you should use models that interfere with flexible deployment. Things that were frustrating to us were down-routing to models we hadn’t requested when they weren’t available. Making routing claims that don’t hold, getting detailed caching reasoning and traces, or controlling how we can use the tools, hooks, and mcps that we want to in the places we wanted to work from. We fixed it by building a truly universal pipe Cloud models, self-hosted models, custom models, your own keys, the hardware under your desk: it all connects the same way, and bringing your own costs nothing. We figured out how to bring models to the apps you already operate in without changing the setup and assumptions around your work. We’re really excited to build this with you and want to make everything we can open source and maintained by the community.
https://github.com/ConiferKit/use-conifer