Change model on the Fly

[rajaasim]

Not all tasks require Pro, some lightweight tasks are much more suited for Flash

[acoliver]

They've responded to this many times. They don't want to do it in general because they have a vision of multi-model routing. Most of that involves Flash doing more things (like search, summarization, and compaction, loop detection), but they want to decide for you. Originally, it asked Flash each time where the request should be routed, but they removed it.

If you truly want this, you can come downstream: https://github.com/acoliver/llxprt-code - it is a fork but we stay up with gemini-cli's latest features and releases, but support more models, and you can choose your model with /model or --model among other things.