release aidev SIG 2/5

Aider v0.81.0: quasar-alpha model support and OpenRouter OAuth prompt

Aider added the free openrouter/openrouter/quasar-alpha model (55% on its polyglot coding benchmark, run via aider --model quasar) and now offers OpenRouter OAuth when an OpenRouter model is selected without an API key. The rest is error handling and dependency hygiene.

PUBLISHED2025-04-04
OBSERVED2026-08-11
AGE1y
SOURCES1
  • Added openrouter/openrouter/quasar-alpha, free on OpenRouter at the time of release; scored 55% on the polyglot coding benchmark; run with aider --model quasar.
  • Offers OpenRouter OAuth when an OpenRouter model is specified but the API key is missing.
  • No longer retries API calls when the provider reports insufficient credits.
  • Clearer error message for OpenRouter connection issues (mentions rate limiting / upstream provider problems).
  • Weak models configured for Gemini 2.5 Pro: gemini/gemini-2.0-flash and openrouter/google/gemini-2.0-flash-exp:free; metadata added for the latter.
  • URL detection no longer swallows trailing double quotes.
  • Dependency bumps for yanked fsspec/aiohttp and a litellm fix that surfaces the root cause of OpenRouter "choices" errors.

COMMUNITY

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