I Built a CLI That Talks to 13 LLM Providers — Here's What I Learned

A few months ago, I hit a wall with AI coding tools. Not because they were bad. In fact, some of them were incredibly good. The problem was that each one came with an invisible asterisk: great, as long as you stay inside this vendor's world. Use this model, this API shape, this tool format, this auth flow, this worldview. As a developer, that started to bother me more and more. I wanted a coding agent CLI that felt serious enough for real work, but open enough that I could swap providers, inspect the runtime, and build on top of it without fighting a black box. So I built cloclo: an open-source MIT-licensed CLI that can talk to 13 LLM providers through one runtime. npx cloclo Why I started: vendor lock-in was slowing me down If you build deeply around one API, you inherit all of its assumptions: how system instructions are passed, how tools are defined, how streaming behaves, how auth works. The moment you try another provider, the "portable" abstraction starts leaking everywhere. So i