I'm wondering, is there a tool or something out there that helps me pick a model, in the vast sea of models out there these days? Every time I need a model for something I see the list on openrouter and I'm completely overwhelmed.<p>I'd love to be able to explain my use case, my cost preferences and have a tool select a few good models to try.<p>E.g. I wrote a tool that cleans out my email spam box. It classifies emails that are already flagged as spam, and if it's very obviously spam it removes it permanently (keeps a copy on disk though). And after x emails, it goes through the list of deleted spam mails and suggests email rules. What model would be best suited? I'd love to be able to explain this use case and get this info served to me. The list of models and the information about what they're good at is just too splintered and spread out. I landed on google/gemma-4-31b for now, because it's cheap and good enough and also supports Dutch and French a bit. But I can't realistically try them all.
I use models.dev's CLI tool, which I think gets data from OpenRouter, and ArtificialAnalysis so your coding agent can help you narrow it down.<p><sidenote><p>Similarly, HuggingFace has a CLI + a few skills, and they are very useful.<p>I had a production image processing using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite (which is getting discontinued in October), and in 20 minutes Claude Code + HF Cli recommended the best replacement small model (Qwen VL 3B something) and proceeded to fine tune it on my datataset. All this while I was in a rush to get dressed and go to the store.<p>It cost ~$3 I think, and results were excellent. Not perfect, but not far from perfect either.<p>We didn't replace Gemini in prod at the time, because we didn't have time to do all the math on how to end up with a smaller bill/mo.<p></sidenote>
My approach to this problem is to just...not try them all.<p>As long as the model you're using solves the problems you have to your satisfaction, there is no need to try any other models, except for financial reasons maybe.<p>So I start with a relatively cheap model (GLM 5.3 flash for me) and as long as it accomplishes the task (it did so far) I don't have to change. And even if it can't do something, the first thing I change is see if I can give it more tools or better context (useful even if I switch models later) or trying a different approach to the problem.<p>If google/gemma-4-31b works, you don't need to overthink it.
Starting with GLM-5.3 Flash was a pretty decent first try! I started with other models, and ended up settling on this exact one because all the others were either too slow or unreliable for my tasks. Qwen 3.8 didn't do it for me, whatever tweaks I added to my harness. Where I'm getting at is you did start with an incredible model in the first place, which greatly helps sticking to it.
I use Gemini(s) because I can send pdfs as files to their API and not worry too much. I've started to diverge and consacrate a part of my pipeline to sending image based pdf pages to glm flash 5.3, not sure how to address / test it properly.<p>Long term I have fears I can't depend of the Google's AI api.
> If google/gemma-4-31b works, you don't need to overthink it.<p>Up until recently I had a gemini flash 2.0 api deployed that did summarization and translation of news articles/corporate statements fast and cheap and had no reason to update it.<p>If it works fine, this chase of the latest LLM is bit pointless.
satisficing instead of optimising
This 100%
If you use the Chinese ones at least the energy comes from solar - aside from that, pick one and see if it solves your problems
Why not just ask Google AI or ChatGPT to help with choosing?
Have you tried openrouters auto model? Tries to give you the best model based on prompt and price<p><a href="https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/openclaw-integration#using-auto-model-for-cost-optimization" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/openclaw-i...</a>
That’s if you have disparate prompts and don’t want to actively select a model. If you’re developing a pipeline, it’s a terrible idea. You want to choose a model, validate it, then stick to it.
It's not like new releases come with fully mapped out capability scores for exactly the aspects that you're interested in. There are benchmarks, but reality is often different. It's simply unknown to humanity how well each model will perform in your own bespoke context unless you just try them. You can read experiences and vibes by others but often they will use them in different ways or have different preferences etc.<p>They generally all try to make them good at everything, it's not like they'd declare "this model is not made for task X".
>I'd love to be able to explain my use case, my cost preferences and have a tool select a few good models to try.<p>Ask one of the top-tier models to do deep research on it.
I use claude for work, and opencode go at home, but i do dabble with openrouter from time to time, and then i just browse the model catalog and filter/sort by recent popularity, price, context size or whatever matters for the task.<p>Mostly just popularity trends, hoping that there's some wisdom in the crowd.
I use costgoat to be a cheapass
<a href="https://costgoat.com/compare/llm-api#pricing-guide" rel="nofollow">https://costgoat.com/compare/llm-api#pricing-guide</a>
For TTS I launched this like this week based on a Reddit thread of recommendations, added a new one to it.. I want to say on Wednesday, but this week has been a blur. Problem I’ve found with similar sites is I can’t run a lot of the models, or the results are beyond stale.<p>But this is only stuff I can run locally, or it’s a cloud model.<p>So.. This is good for right now!<p><a href="https://apimade.com/audio-compare.html" rel="nofollow">https://apimade.com/audio-compare.html</a>
For cost you can route the same task via openrouter and see what it costs. Literally a for m on models do task loop and look at the cost.
It's the same problem as trying to buy a car or choose what clothes to buy. You just have to read about options, try things out.