BIGGEST 💥 4 the $$$ - Model Selection (with skill)

I kept reanswering the same question at midnight: which model should this conversation run on?

So I built the thing that answers it for me.

https://github.com/dvogeldev/model-picker

A skill for any agent that reads skills. Ask it "which model for X?" and it pulls the live Nous Portal and OpenRouter catalogs, ranks every model on three axes, and gives you one pick plus one cheaper alternate, with current prices and promotions. A promoted flagship can beat an unpromoted one at equal fit. Free tiers count as real picks.

Every model gets classified: capability tier (frontier, flagship, value, small), deployment (API, or open weights you can self-host), and use case (long context, hard reasoning, agentic, coding).

In pi you get /set-model coding. One command. The standing coding model for the session, thinking level included.

A daily timer re-ingests both catalogs at 6:30 AM, so the standing map never goes stale. You stop defaulting to whatever you used last week and start choosing on purpose.

Install is two lines. MIT. Your API keys stay in your own password manager. No key lands in a config file.

It works in pi, opencode, hermes, and grok. Same skill in every harness. The standing map is a JSON file in your home directory: edit it, override it. Your call which model does which work.

Try it, then ask your agent "which model should handle this?" Tell me below what it picked and whether you agreed. That's the part I read the comments for.

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Why Nous Portal as the provider

Fair question, since the skill also reads OpenRouter.

portal.nousresearch.com is Nous Research, the same lab behind Hermes Agent. Three reasons it's my default surface.

1. The catalog is OpenRouter underneath. Same schema, same model IDs, same naming. That's why one picker script parses both catalogs with one parser.

2. It's built for the Hermes environment. Hermes is Nous's own model line, and the same lab runs the inference. One account, one key, one bill. hermes setup --portal and your agent is on it.

3. The discounts find you. The third-party catalog alone counts 315 models today. Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok on the frontier side. Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, and MiniMax on the flagship side. Right now: 8 standing discounts (Tencent HY4 at 80% off), 40-odd models with weekday and weekend promo schedules, and free variants on top.

I wrote a longer post on this a while back. The numbers have moved since, in the right direction. Counts and promos are today-numbers, not permanent features. Check portal.nousresearch.com/models before you subscribe.

PS: Contributors welcome.

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BIGGEST 💥 4 the $$$ - Model Selection (with skill)