model-radar: a tool to find free LLMs that actually make tool calls

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The author built two small commands, model-radar and model-canary, to run alongside AI agents. model-radar lists free OpenRouter models and tests whether each one really makes a tool call, since many claim support but respond in prose only. model-canary monitors the paid model and credit balance, failing over to a cheaper or local model when needed. Setup takes about ten minutes with Python 3.11 or newer and requires no pip installs, and the guide is tested weekly on a fresh Ubuntu machine. The tools can run without credentials to verify installation, though probing and failover require an OpenRouter account. The author suggests running them periodically via cron, with failover triggered after two consecutive hard failures.

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