So everyone has their preferred way of doing it.

1. I go direct to source, i.e. DS platform, I find it cheaper than paying the openrouter tax -- I also switch it up a bit

2. I built a local LLM router, that I update with new profiles that have my preferred provider of the week (lowest token costs/speed) with fallbacks, like mimo --> DS4 etc.. if there is overloading,

3. I use 3 diff harnesses, CC/Codex + Opencode -- they all talk to each other through a custom rig system that routes messages between llms using a Rust backed structured JSON system

Not saying this is the best, it's just what I like and works for me^.

I can flow quite naturally between Opus/Astra/K3/GLM/MiMo/DS/etc.. this way and often do...more so these days with subs no longer great as they used to be.

Whatever openrouter puts me on, running in pi (though I do all comms over my xmpp wrapper).

Deepseek harness is great!