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Avocado Studio is provider-agnostic. The planner runs the same prompts and emits the same operations whether you wire it to Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, or Google Gemini. You bring the API keys; no per-seat pricing, no vendor lock-in. This page is for the developer or self-hoster deciding which keys to set and which models plan the edits. A single chat turn plans on one provider. Image generation is configured separately, so you can plan on Claude and generate images with Gemini or OpenAI.

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Supported providers

At least one provider key is required for AI editing. With none, chat still answers from a built-in planner that handles simple, literal edits, and visual editing works in full. Each request names its provider. A request that names none — from a script or an MCP client, say — plans on the first configured key in the order OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini. Set CHAT_PLANNER_FORCE_SONNET=1 to send those requests to Claude Sonnet instead whenever an Anthropic key is set.

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Bring your own keys

Set whichever you have in .env:
The editor reads /status/planner on boot to find out which providers have keys. Providers without keys are never offered. Keys never leave your orchestrator. The editor and your site talk to the orchestrator over HTTP; the orchestrator is the only process that holds API credentials.

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Model tiers

Every provider has four tiers. Each tier is a separate env var, so you can change the model behind a tier without changing code: Agent mode does not use these tiers. It has its own two variables, AGENT_ANTHROPIC_MODEL (default claude-sonnet-5-5) and AGENT_OPENAI_MODEL (default gpt-5.6-terra).

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Defaults

Override any of them in .env. The orchestrator reads these variables once, when it starts, so restart it after changing one.
The model picker shows each tier by its default model’s name. It cannot see an override yet, so after you set ANTHROPIC_MODEL_BALANCED it still reads “Sonnet 5.5”.

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Tiered routing in action

When a user types in the editor:
  1. Intent router runs on the FAST tier. It decides whether this is a chat-only message (“what does Hero do?”), a real edit, or ambiguous, and how complex the edit is.
  2. Full planner runs on the tier you picked, BALANCED unless you changed it. The router and planner run in parallel (CHAT_PARALLEL_PLANNER=1, the default). When the router judges an edit simple, the planner drops to the FAST model for that turn.
  3. Extended thinking switches on for complex prompts on Anthropic (CHAT_AUTO_REASONING=1, the default). Signals: multi-step asks, conditional language (“if there’s already a CTA, …”), structural verbs (“restructure,” “rewrite tone of”), long prompts. The model stays the same; only thinking is added.
So a “fix typo in hero” request typically costs one cheap Haiku call, while “restructure the homepage to be more conversion-focused” runs on Sonnet with extended thinking. No request is moved up to a larger tier automatically.

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Extended thinking (Anthropic only)

When CHAT_AUTO_REASONING=1 is on (default), the planner enables Anthropic’s extended thinking for complex prompts. SSE events stream the thinking tokens back to the editor:
  • thinking_start — model begins reasoning
  • thinking_token — incremental text deltas
  • thinking_end — reasoning complete
The editor renders these as a collapsible “Thinking…” block above the change log.
OpenAI and Gemini models do their own reasoning, but the planner does not stream it. Thinking events come from Anthropic only.

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Image generation routing

Image generation is decoupled from the planner. Two env vars control it:
If the configured provider has no API key, the orchestrator falls back to the other backend rather than failing.

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Switching providers from the editor

Every chat message carries an optional provider (openai | anthropic | gemini) and modelKey (fast | balanced | reasoning | codex). The editor sends both on every message. You choose them in Settings → Model, and the choice is remembered in your browser. The picker offers Claude models whenever the orchestrator has an Anthropic key. OpenAI and Gemini are still wired end to end, but they are not held to the same quality bar, so the picker lists them only on a deployment that has no Anthropic key.
There is no server-side way to override a provider the request names — the per-message provider from the client wins. To constrain a deployment, supply only the API key for the provider you want. A request that names a provider without a key falls back to one that has one.

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See also