Use Poolside models in Pi

Use the Poolside Platform or Poolside deployment option if you want Pi to call Poolside’s inference endpoint directly with your own API key. Use OpenRouter if you already route your models through OpenRouter, or want to compare Poolside models alongside others.

Watch the setup video

Prerequisites

You have Pi installed. Run pi --version to confirm the installation. For other installation options, including npm and Windows, see the Pi Quickstart.
You have one of the following:
- A Poolside Platform API key. To create one, go to platform.poolside.ai.
- An API key for your organization’s Poolside deployment.
- An OpenRouter API key with access to Poolside models. To create one, go to OpenRouter API keys.

Steps

Poolside Platform
Poolside deployment
OpenRouter

Pi finds custom providers in ~/.pi/agent/models.json.

Make your Poolside Platform API key available as an environment variable. Add it to your shell profile.
export POOLSIDE_API_KEY="<api-key>"

Create or open ~/.pi/agent/models.json and add Poolside as a provider. To find model IDs for your access method, see List available models.

~/.pi/agent/models.json

{
  "providers": {
    "poolside": {
      "baseUrl": "https://inference.poolside.ai/v1",
      "api": "openai-completions",
      "apiKey": "$POOLSIDE_API_KEY",
      "models": [
        {
          "id": "<poolside-model-id>",
          "name": "Poolside model",
          "reasoning": true,
          "contextWindow": 256000,
          "maxTokens": 32768
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

In your terminal, run pi.
pi
Run /model.
/model
Select the Poolside model you added.
Send a codebase question to confirm Pi responds with the selected Poolside model.

If you run Poolside on your own infrastructure, set the base URL to your deployment’s OpenAI-compatible endpoint instead. Replace <api-domain> with your deployment’s host. The path is /openai/v1.

Pi finds custom providers in ~/.pi/agent/models.json.

Make the API key for your Poolside deployment available as an environment variable. Add it to your shell profile.
export POOLSIDE_API_KEY="<api-key>"

Create or open ~/.pi/agent/models.json and add Poolside as a provider. To find model IDs for your access method, see List available models.

~/.pi/agent/models.json

{
  "providers": {
    "poolside": {
      "baseUrl": "https://poolside.example.com/openai/v1",
      "api": "openai-completions",
      "apiKey": "$POOLSIDE_API_KEY",
      "models": [
        {
          "id": "<poolside-model-id>",
          "name": "Poolside model",
          "reasoning": true,
          "contextWindow": 256000,
          "maxTokens": 32768
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

In your terminal, run pi.
pi
Run /model.
/model
Select the Poolside model you added.
Send a codebase question to confirm Pi responds with the selected Poolside model.

In your terminal, run pi.
pi
Run /login.
/login
Select OpenRouter and paste your OpenRouter API key.
Run /model.
/model
Search for a Poolside model served through OpenRouter. OpenRouter may offer free and paid Poolside models. To see current availability, see Poolside models on OpenRouter.
Select the model you want to use. Pi ships with a generated model snapshot, so recently released models may not appear in /model on older Pi versions. To add a model yourself, see Custom Models in the Pi documentation.
Send a codebase question to confirm Pi responds with the selected Poolside model.

​Watch the setup video

​Prerequisites

​Steps

​Related resources

Watch the setup video

Prerequisites

Steps

Related resources