Inspiration: Unsloth
Unsloth's Connections feature provides a polished UX for managing all model providers in one place:
- Cloud providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter) with API keys
- Model servers (llama.cpp, vLLM, Ollama) with base URLs
- Unified model dropdown: Shows local, cloud, and external models in a single sorted list
- Prompt caching indicators: Shows which models support prompt caching
- Per-provider capabilities: Dynamically exposes reasoning levels, image support, thinking modes
- Provider-native features: OpenAI web search, Anthropic code execution passed through
Current RustyClaw state
RustyClaw has a provider registry in providers.rs with support for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, OpenRouter, Ollama, and custom providers. But:
- No UI for managing providers beyond the onboard wizard
- No runtime add/remove of providers
- No capability discovery (just hardcoded per-provider)
- Ollama integration exists but is separate from the main provider UX
What RustyClaw could do
- Connections panel in TUI/Desktop: Add/remove/edit providers with test-connection button
- Runtime provider CRUD: Add new providers without restarting the gateway
- Capability detection: Auto-detect model capabilities (vision, thinking, tool use, prompt caching) via provider API
- Mixed model chat: Let a session switch models mid-conversation (useful for: "this model's bad at math, switch to o1 for this query")
- Provider health: Show latency, error rate, rate limit status per provider
Scope
rustyclaw-tui + rustyclaw-desktop: Provider management panels
rustyclaw-core: Runtime provider add/remove + capability detection
rustyclaw-core: Provider health tracking (latency histograms, error counters)
Prior art
Inspiration: Unsloth
Unsloth's Connections feature provides a polished UX for managing all model providers in one place:
Current RustyClaw state
RustyClaw has a provider registry in
providers.rswith support for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, OpenRouter, Ollama, and custom providers. But:What RustyClaw could do
Scope
rustyclaw-tui+rustyclaw-desktop: Provider management panelsrustyclaw-core: Runtime provider add/remove + capability detectionrustyclaw-core: Provider health tracking (latency histograms, error counters)Prior art