Design and Motivation
I wanted to have some way to test new models from various labs without always having a subscription to all of them. There are some nice multi-provider options, like t3 chat, but that still required me to have some sort of subscription. I was also interested in seeing just what it took to build a basic AI chat interface (hint: armed with Claude Code and Codex, the answer is not much).
Enter pro-chat, my take on a minimal AI chat app. It's not super fully-featured, but it has all the basics needed to chat with LLMs from any provider on OpenRouter. I built in web search using the Brave API and added slash commands to be able to quickly switch between models and thinking levels, the lack of which has always bugged me on the standard apps. This idea initially started out as a web app, wherein I had some designs on offering it as a service. I eventually decided, however, that the API-wrapper business was not one I wanted to be in, so retooled it to be a Tauri app for MacOS and put it on Github. Overall, still happy I made it. I don't use it a ton, just because tokenomics don't make as much sense without a subscription, but it's still a nice, tidy little project. Also of note is that the icon (perhaps obviously) was designed by Codex and produced by GPT Image 1.5.
