ai-switch

The problem it solves

When you use multiple coding agents and multiple model providers, changing providers separately in Claude Code and Codex is repetitive and error-prone. ai-switch updates both agents in one command.

Choose a provider profile once, then activate it with ai-switch use NAME. The built-in GLM and DeepSeek presets already contain the provider-specific files, endpoints, protocols, model catalogs, and Claude Code mappings recommended by their official documentation. You only need to enter your API key. Custom OpenAI-compatible providers are supported too.

A profile can offer several models (for example GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash, or DeepSeek Flash and DeepSeek V4 Pro). ai-switch use asks which one to activate and writes the answer to both agents, so the model pickers inside Claude Code and Codex keep working instead of being pinned to a single model.

Switching also leaves conversation history alone: sessions, rollouts, history.jsonl and the agents' runtime databases are never copied into a profile or overwritten by a switch, and ai-switch doctor reports the things that really do make old sessions disappear.

This is a secure, headless-friendly command-line tool for servers without a desktop environment or administrator privileges.

Install

Install from PyPI (recommended):

python3 -m pip install --user ai-switch-cli

For a system or virtual-environment install:

pip install ai-switch-cli

Install the latest development version directly from GitHub:

python3 -m pip install --user "git+https://github.com/ZidongS/ai-switch.git"

Or install a local checkout:

python3 -m pip install --user .

If ai-switch is not found afterwards, add the user script directory to PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Quick start

Save the configuration currently in use as a fallback profile:

ai-switch init default --description "Default daily configuration"

Create a ready-to-use mainstream provider profile interactively:

ai-switch add

Select glm or deepseek, enter the API key, and activate the generated configuration:

ai-switch use glm

use activates the profile and does not ask anything: the profile's whole model list is published, so you pick the model inside the agent with /model (Codex) or its Opus/Sonnet/Haiku categories (Claude Code). The default for new sessions is the one you last used, or the profile default. Add --choose if you want to be asked, or -m/--model to set the default directly.

Active profile: glm
Default model: glm-5.3 (new sessions)
Published models: 3 - switch any time with /model inside codex (Claude Code uses its
Opus/Sonnet/Haiku mappings), or change the default with -m/--model.

With --choose you get the picker instead:

This profile provides 3 models:
  1) glm-5.3         GLM-5.3 flagship (1M context)  [default]
  2) glm-5.3-flash   GLM-5.3 Flash (fast, text+image, 1M context)
  3) glm-5-turbo     GLM-5 Turbo (agent-optimized, 200K context)
Select model [1-3, Enter=glm-5.3, q=cancel]:

For scripts and servers, choose without prompting (name, unique prefix, or index):

ai-switch use glm --model glm-5.3-flash
ai-switch use glm -m 2 -y
ai-switch use glm --dry-run          # show what would change
ai-switch use glm -m glm-5.3 --pin   # publish only this model (see below)

Selecting a model sets the default for new sessions in both agents, and the profile's other models stay in the catalogue so you can still switch inside the agent. That means an in-app /model choice is a per-session override — and Codex writes its own choice back to ~/.codex/config.toml when it exits, so the two agents can drift apart without anything else noticing; ai-switch doctor reports exactly that. If you want an activation to be exclusive instead, add --pin: the published catalogue then holds only the selected model, so Codex's own picker has nothing else to switch to (the next ai-switch use without --pin restores the full menu).

Edit ~/.codex/config.toml and ~/.claude/settings.json for another provider, then save that configuration as a second profile:

ai-switch init glm --description "GLM Coding Plan"
ai-switch list
ai-switch use glm
ai-switch current

Create a profile through an interactive prompt (no editor required; API keys are hidden while typing). Choose the built-in glm preset to generate the complete ZAI Codex Responses configuration, Codex model catalog and Claude Code model/environment mappings for the three models the endpoint publishes (glm-5.3, glm-5.3-flash, glm-5-turbo) automatically. The deepseek preset creates the two model entries the DeepSeek endpoint currently accepts (deepseek-flash and deepseek-v4-pro, both with image input metadata) plus the recommended Claude Code mappings:

ai-switch add

Update an existing profile description:

ai-switch describe default "Default daily configuration"

list shows the active marker, profile name, configured clients, description, detected models, and endpoint hostnames. API keys are never printed.

Choosing a model

Each profile keeps its model list in models.json next to the client files:

ai-switch models                 # list the models of the active profile
ai-switch models glm --json      # machine readable
ai-switch upgrade glm            # derive models.json for a profile from an older release

For every model a profile records the Codex catalogue entry and the Claude Code mapping, so activating one model updates all of these consistently:

• Codex: the top-level model (and model_reasoning_effort), plus a ~/.codex/models.json catalogue that lists every model of the profile, which is what makes Codex's own /model picker show them.
• Claude Code: the default model in settings.json plus the Opus/Sonnet/Haiku mappings. The presets map the three categories to different provider models where they exist, and they never set ANTHROPIC_MODEL, because a pinned environment model overrides your selection and makes /model do nothing.

The glm and deepseek presets ship multi-model lists. A custom (OpenAI-compatible) profile is open-ended as well: when you create it you can name several models at once, separated by spaces or commas (for example DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash Kimi-K3 Qwen3.8-Max), and those become the profile's catalogue — both agents can then pick them. Any other name the endpoint serves still works with ai-switch use NAME --model <name>, and it is added to the catalogue when you use it.

When a provider adds or renames a model

Model names change, and an endpoint refuses a name it does not know. Ask the provider what your key may use:

curl -s https://api.deepseek.com/models      -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"   # OpenAI-style list
curl -s https://open.bigmodel.cn/api/v1/models -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"  # Codex-format catalogue

A rejected name is also reported in the API error itself ("The supported API model names are ...", or 模型不存在，请检查模型代码。). Some providers publish their Codex catalogue directly (/api/v1/models on ZAI returns exactly the entries a profile's codex-models.json wants), so it can be copied verbatim. Historically DeepSeek answered to deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp; today those are aliases that the endpoint resolves to deepseek-flash.

To add a model, append it to the profile's models.json — the claude mapping decides what Opus/Sonnet/Haiku resolve to, the codex entry controls whether Codex's own picker offers it. Keep the entries of names that older sessions were recorded with in the Codex catalogue so those sessions stay resumable, then activate:

ai-switch use deepseek -m deepseek-flash

Model suffixes are proxy-specific: DeepSeek's Claude endpoint accepts and strips a [1m] marker (deepseek-v4-pro[1m]), while ZAI rejects it as an unknown model — glm-5.3 is already 1M context and must be used without a suffix. Worth a one-token request before trusting a name in a profile.

Session history

Conversation history belongs to the agents, not to a provider, so ai-switch never manages it. These files are deliberately excluded from profiles and switches:

~/.codex/history.jsonl, ~/.codex/session_index.jsonl, ~/.codex/sessions/,
~/.codex/*_N.sqlite (runtime state, logs, goals, memories)
~/.claude.json, ~/.claude/history.jsonl, ~/.claude/projects/, ~/.claude/sessions/

If sessions do seem to disappear after a switch, run:

ai-switch doctor          # full report; --json for tooling
ai-switch doctor --fix    # quarantine damaged Codex runtime databases

doctor checks, among other things:

• Damaged SQLite runtime databases. Codex keeps thread metadata in ~/.codex/state_*.sqlite and thread_history_1.sqlite. When one is damaged (typical messages: database disk image is malformed, file is not a database) Codex silently stops listing recent sessions in codex resume. doctor detects this — reading a snapshot copy when the live file cannot be opened — and --fix moves the damaged files into ~/.config/ai-switch/quarantine/<timestamp>/. Codex rebuilds the database from the rollout files on the next start, which brings resumable sessions back. Rollouts and history are not touched.

• Network filesystems. If CODEX_HOME lives on NFS/CIFS/SMB, SQLite databases are corrupted sooner or later, which is the usual root cause of "history lost after switching". Keep the runtime databases on a local disk instead:

  export CODEX_SQLITE_HOME=/var/tmp/codex-sqlite-$USER   # a local, persistent directory
  

  Codex only honours the environment variable: a sqlite_home key in config.toml is parsed but ignored (checked with codex doctor). ai-switch add asks for a local directory when it detects a network filesystem, creates it and prints the export line to put in your shell profile; ai-switch doctor reports the variable's status.

• A stale model catalogue. A catalogue left behind by the previous provider hides the new provider's models from Codex and makes sessions that used them unresumable. ai-switch removes that leftover file (only if it wrote it itself, and it backs it up first), and doctor verifies the configured model exists in the catalogue.

• Disabled history persistence ([history] persistence = "none"), a Claude Code model pinned by ANTHROPIC_MODEL, and claude/codex processes that are running while you switch and will rewrite their configuration on exit.

codex resume only lists sessions of the current directory by default; codex resume --all shows every directory. That cwd filter, not a lost session, is a common false alarm.

Safety and storage

Before activation, the current Codex and Claude files are backed up under ~/.config/ai-switch/backups/<timestamp>/ (files that a switch removes are kept under removed/). Profiles are stored under ~/.config/ai-switch/profiles/; directories use mode 700 and files use mode 600. The active profile and the last used model are recorded in ~/.config/ai-switch/state.json. Restart claude or codex after switching so the process reloads its configuration.

Set AI_SWITCH_HOME to use a different profile directory, CODEX_HOME/CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR for relocated agent configurations, and AI_SWITCH_API_KEY to fill the API key prompt non-interactively.

Commands

ai-switch init NAME [-d DESCRIPTION]  Save current files as a new profile
ai-switch list                        List profiles and configuration summaries
ai-switch use NAME [-m MODEL] [-y] [-n]  Back up and activate a profile (and a model)
ai-switch models [NAME] [--json]      Show the models a profile offers
ai-switch current                     Print the active profile
ai-switch describe NAME TEXT          Set a profile description
ai-switch upgrade NAME                Derive models.json for a profile from an older release
ai-switch add                         Create a profile interactively (GLM, DeepSeek, or custom)
ai-switch doctor [--fix] [--json]     Check configuration and session-history health
ai-switch --help                      Show full usage and examples

Upgrading from 0.1

Existing profiles keep working. Profiles that only have codex-models.json are read as before and get a model picker automatically; run ai-switch upgrade NAME (or re-create the profile with ai-switch add) to materialise an editable models.json with explicit per-model Claude Code mappings.

Development

python3 -m unittest -v

The project uses only the Python standard library.