Open Router

What This Skill Does

The Open Router skill provides a structured framework for managing multi-model workflows through the OpenRouter API. It transitions users from ad-hoc model selection to a resilient, production-ready routing architecture. By leveraging a centralized memory structure located in ~/open-router/, the skill enables systematic tracking of provider authentication, cost guardrails, and complex fallback chains. It ensures that your AI agents remain operational despite individual provider outages or rate limits, and it maintains strict cost control by enforcing spending limits per task class.

Installation

To integrate this skill, run the following command in your terminal within an OpenClaw enabled environment: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ivangdavila/open-router

Use Cases

• Enterprise Cost Management: Implement per-task budget caps to prevent runaway token expenditure during high-volume research or indexing tasks.
• Production-Grade Resilience: Configure automated fallback mechanisms where a request automatically switches from a primary model (e.g., Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to a cost-effective secondary (e.g., Haiku or GPT-4o-mini) if the first fails due to rate limits or API outages.
• Task-Specific Routing: Direct specific coding tasks to models optimized for logic, while routing summarization tasks to high-throughput, low-cost models.

Example Prompts

1. "Open Router: Configure a routing rule that sends all code refactoring tasks to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but set a fallback to GPT-4o if the latency exceeds 5 seconds."
2. "Update my budget guardrails for the 'Analysis' task class; limit the total spend to $5.00 per day for this category and notify me in incidents.md if we exceed 80% of that."
3. "Verify my current OpenRouter provider authentication and show me the active fallback chain for my coding workload."

Tips & Limitations

• Modularity: Always update your routing-rules.md and budgets.md files separately to ensure that if a configuration issue occurs, you can isolate the variable.
• Security: Never hardcode your API key into any markdown files. Always rely on environment variables (OPENROUTER_API_KEY) and use the skill to verify connectivity.
• Iteration: The core rule is to change one layer at a time. Do not attempt to overhaul your entire routing architecture simultaneously; verify each model switch and fallback trigger before moving to the next task classification.