Connecting Your First LLM Provider

Zoo Code needs an inference provider to access the LLM models that make it work.

A great model to start is Claude Sonnet 4.5, which offers a lot of power at a reasonable price point. To get it going, choose a provider:

• OpenRouter: Provides access to multiple AI models from different labs through a single API key. Great for flexibility and getting started reasonably fast. To get an API key, follow these instructions

• Anthropic: Direct access to the Claude family of models. Requires API access approval and may have rate limits depending on your tier. To get an API key, follow these instructions

Zoo Code is compatible with other providers which offer Claude, and with a wide range of different models you can try.

Model Selection Advice

We recommend Claude Sonnet 4.5 because it "just works" out of the box for most tasks. We use it internally a lot.

You can choose other models, but that introduces complexity. Different models vary in how they follow tool instructions, parse formats, and maintain context through multi-step operations, so it may be better to try them later. If you do experiment with other models, choose ones specifically designed for structured reasoning and tool use.

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Configuring the provider in VS Code

1. Open the Zoo Code panel by clicking the Zoo Code icon () in the VS Code Activity Bar
2. In the welcome screen, choose your LLM provider.
3. Paste the API key you copied from your provider into the right field and continue.
4. Select your model (it should be called claude-sonnet-4-5 or anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5) and complete the process.

Now you can start coding!