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.
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.
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.
<sidenote>
Similarly, HuggingFace has a CLI + a few skills, and they are very useful.
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.
It cost ~$3 I think, and results were excellent. Not perfect, but not far from perfect either.
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.
mavamaarten · · focus · HN ↗
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.
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.
testycool · · focus · HN ↗
<sidenote>
Similarly, HuggingFace has a CLI + a few skills, and they are very useful.
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.
It cost ~$3 I think, and results were excellent. Not perfect, but not far from perfect either.
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.
</sidenote>