setting up an API connection is definitely a bit more involved, but it allows people to use it for their specific needs that the API devs may not have thought of. For example to translate all of prolewiki english to french, I set up an API access to mistral to use their servers/models to do the actual translation. Basically I sent a chunk of text through the API, it did its magic on mistral’s servers side of things, and then their servers return the translated chunk of text. My script saves that returned text to a document, without ever caring what was going on mistral’s side.

There are other programs for agent coding though I don’t have experience with them, but they might make it a bit easier for people to adopt the tools. I know Claude (Anthropic) has one that apparently works with models other than their own, and is a bit more graphical, i.e. you can use it with the mouse while crush is keyboard-only.

But try out crush, it works on any computer and I promise it’s not as scary as it looks haha (if that’s what’s holding you back). Once you’re connected it works every time you’ll use it from then on.