Models & Providers

kli ships the model providers anthropic, openai, openai-codex, and compatible. All but compatible carry a fixed catalogue of model ids, registered when the provider extension installs. The compatible provider has no built-in models; you define its providers, models, and semantic options in ~/.config/kli/providers.json.

Each model id below is the selection value for that model. A model is available only when its provider's credential is present. For credential keys, transports, semantic option lowering, and the OAuth flow, see Providers and Transports.

anthropic

Transport: Messages API (anthropic-messages). Credential: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. Base URL: https://api.anthropic.com. All models declare reasoning-effort.

openai

Transport: Responses API (openai-responses). Credential: OPENAI_API_KEY. Base URL: https://api.openai.com/v1. All models declare reasoning-effort.

openai-codex

Transport: Responses API (openai-responses) against the ChatGPT backend. Credential: OAuth only — there is no environment key; you sign in with a ChatGPT account. Base URL: https://chatgpt.com/backend-api. All models declare reasoning-effort.

The catalogue is the ChatGPT-account allowlist. The endpoint rejects any other id.

compatible

User-defined OpenAI-compatible providers, read from ~/.config/kli/providers.json. This provider registers nothing of its own; each entry in the file becomes a provider with its own id, models, credential, and semantic option schemas. The file is a JSON object keyed by provider id. Secrets never live in the file — key-env names the environment variable that holds the key. If key-env is absent, the provider registers without a credential reference.

Per-provider fields:

Per-model fields under models:

Example ~/.config/kli/providers.json:

{
  "my-endpoint": {
    "base-url": "https://api.example.com/v1",
    "api": "openai-completions",
    "key-env": "MY_ENDPOINT_API_KEY",
    "options": {
      "reasoning-effort": {
        "values": ["off", "low", "medium", "high"],
        "default": "off"
      }
    },
    "models": [
      { "id": "model-a", "context-window": 128000 },
      {
        "id": "model-b",
        "name": "Model B",
        "context-window": 32000,
        "options": { "reasoning-effort": null }
      }
    ]
  }
}