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Model roles

Give one client three models — main loop, subagents, and background calls — and mix providers freely.

Coding agents do not make one kind of call. They make three, and the pages that follow each show where to set them for a specific client.

Role What runs there Why it matters
Main loop The model you are talking to Most of the quality
Subagents Parallel workers a task fans out to Most of the tokens
Background Titles, summaries, file descriptions Small, constant, easy to overpay for

Background calls fire on almost every interaction and are invisible. Leaving that slot on a frontier model is the most expensive default in agentic coding.

Set all three at once

bash
npx @webway/connect --key $WEBWAY_API_KEY

This reads your catalogue, detects the clients you have installed, and prints the configuration each one needs. Nothing is written until you add --write.

bash
npx @webway/connect --main <expensive> --sub <mid> --fast <cheap> --write
npx @webway/connect --models        # what your key can reach

Existing config files are merged, not replaced.

Where each client keeps them

Not every client splits all three. Where one does not, the main-loop model runs everything.

Client Main loop Subagents Background
Claude Code ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL, or model: in an agent's frontmatter ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL
Codex CLI model a [profiles.*] block, selected with --profile same
OpenClaw agents.defaults.model.primary per-agent entries under agents per-agent entries under agents
Hermes hermes model — —
TRAE SOLO the selected custom model — —
The OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs the model argument — —

Claude Code is the clearest case: its three ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_* variables are exactly these three roles, and the Haiku slot is what its background work uses.

Mixing providers

The three models do not have to come from one provider. Every model is reachable from every endpoint, so a client that speaks only one protocol can still run a main loop on one vendor and subagents on another:

bash
npx @webway/connect claude-code \
  --main anthropic/claude-opus-5 \
  --sub openai/gpt-5.6-terra \
  --fast deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash --write

Claude Code speaks Anthropic Messages throughout. Webway translates the two requests that are not going to Anthropic. See Protocol translation for what that costs.