2026-08-27 - A model that needs no key, and the parts not worth copying

An installed coding assistant is already authenticated, so running it as a subprocess reaches a capable model with no key, no download and no accelerator. Kind::Cli plus crates/orbistoun-llm/src/cli.rs, ported from an earlier project of mine, including its Windows discovery order and the reason for it (D333).

Three things were measured before being trusted, and two changed the design. The command reads a prompt from stdin - so the prompt does not go in the argument list, where a Windows command line would have capped it near thirty-two thousand characters and failed silently one day. Its diagnostics go to stderr, so a bare stdout.trim() is safe; my first check merged the streams and briefly suggested otherwise. And asked plainly for twelve nouns as a JSON array it returned exactly that, so the sibling's "ignore your default role" framing is not carried over until something shows it is needed.

What it cannot do is declared, not hidden. No seed, no temperature - and the proposal loop is built on both. describe() says so, because an engine that quietly drops a field it was handed cannot be told apart from one that honoured it.

It ranks with the hosted providers, not the local ones. I proposed putting it above the local CPU engine; the seeding code's own comment says local outranks hosted because this project's material should not be posted elsewhere by default, and a subprocess that answers over the network is not exempt for being easy to install. First among the hosted entries, since it needs no key.

orbistoun-suggest now prints which backend and model answered each round. There is more than one kind of engine now and they differ in where the prompt goes, so a person running it should not have to read a configuration file to find out which one it was.