Shared by @futuretrees
The model you pick changes the answer you get. Not by a little — by a lot.
OpenRouter has hundreds of models on it. Each one has its own personality: some are great at vision, some hold a million tokens of context without losing the thread, some are fast and cheap for tool calls, some are deep reasoners that take their time and earn it. There is no "best model." There is only the best model for this job, this week, in this app.
That last part matters more than people think.
Ditto isn't a thin chat wrapper. It's a stack: a prompting layer, a memory pipeline that recalls and reasons over what you've said before, a tool layer that hits the web and your files and your calendar, and a streaming UI that has opinions about how responses should arrive.
Every model interacts with that stack a little differently. A model that's electric in a clean chat playground can stumble inside Ditto — maybe it ignores tool schemas, maybe it gets confused by long memory recall, maybe it refuses to stream cleanly. And the opposite is just as true: models that look unremarkable on a benchmark can be quiet workhorses inside Ditto because their tool-use is sharp or their instruction-following holds up under our system prompts.
Benchmarks don't capture that. Twitter threads don't capture it. The only thing that does is sitting down and using the model the way you'd actually use it — in Ditto, with real memory, real tools, real prompts.
Ditto Picks is a short list. It's the models we've put through real sessions and trust to hold up. Not the newest. Not the most hyped. Not the cheapest. Just the ones that don't surprise us in the bad way.
They're pinned to the top of the quick model picker — the one that opens when you tap the model name above the chat input. That picker has four sections in order: the model you're using right now, your favorites, Ditto Picks, and recent choices. The picks are always within reach, so the safe bet doesn't take a search.
If you want to go beyond what we've vetted, Settings → Models has the full catalog with filters for capability, context length, privacy, and pricing. Browse however you like.
One quick note on the catalog: we just removed a behavior where the "Newest" sort silently bumped Ditto Picks up among same-day releases. That meant on release day, a brand new model could land below a Pick that happened to share its timestamp.
Newest now means newest. Full stop. If you want Picks, the quick picker has them. If you want what just dropped, the catalog gives you that without a thumb on the scale.
The point of all of this: model choice is a decision worth making. Not a default to live with. Ditto Picks exists so you have a confident shortlist when you don't want to think about it, and so the catalog is honest when you do.
— Peyton