Overview

Kilo Code (slug kilo) is a command-line coding agent driven non-interactively through its kilo run subcommand. It reaches its model through OpenRouter, so a Kilo Code run reports OpenRouter-style model IDs and is priced from the model’s list price. The harness itself is documented at kilo.ai.

Model IDs

Kilo Code’s model IDs are OpenRouter slugs carrying an openrouter/ prefix. A run adds that prefix at launch when the model is bound to the OpenRouter provider. The following are illustrative, not exhaustive:

• openrouter/anthropic/claude-opus-4.8
• openrouter/minimax/minimax-m3
• openrouter/google/gemini-3.5-flash

Invocation

The harness probes and invokes the kilo binary. It is installed into the run container at run time with:

npm install -g @kilocode/cli && npm cache clean --force

A session runs the run subcommand with these flags, followed by the prompt as the final positional argument:

Flag	Purpose
--format json	Emit the line-delimited JSON stream consumed for events and usage.
--auto	Run unattended, without per-action approval prompts.
--model <id>	The model to run.

Authentication

Kilo Code authenticates with an OpenRouter API key, sourced from OPENROUTER_API_KEY on the host and injected into the run container under the same name. See Authentication.

Pricing

The leading openrouter/ is stripped before the catalog lookup, so openrouter/anthropic/claude-opus-4.8 is priced as anthropic/claude-opus-4.8. The comparable cost is computed from the model’s curated list price. See Metrics.