Posts tagged "AI"

The AI Gateway now supports OpenRouter, giving you access to models from providers beyond Netlify’s direct integrations (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini).

This partnership opens up models from providers like DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral, Qwen, and xAI, all billed through your existing Netlify credits.

Learn more about our OpenRouter partnership through the Netlify blog on open models.

Supported models

For a full list of models available on OpenRouter, visit OpenRouter’s models page.

Note that Netlify only allows requests through OpenRouter for model providers that support a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) policy, meaning your prompts and outputs are never stored nor trained on. Models on OpenRouter that do not have any available provider guaranteeing this policy (at the time of your request) are not available via Netlify.

Set up OpenRouter for AI Gateway

As with the other providers, Netlify automatically injects OPENROUTER_API_KEY and OPENROUTER_BASE_URL into your Netlify Functions, Edge Functions, and Preview Server (unless you’ve already set your own values for either).

You can call an OpenRouter-served model using whichever client you prefer:

• OpenRouter SDK (@openrouter/sdk): pass OPENROUTER_BASE_URL explicitly as serverURL when constructing the client, this is the one exception where the base URL isn’t picked up automatically.
• OpenAI SDK: works out of the box, no extra config. Just pass a model ID in OpenRouter notation (e.g. deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731).
• REST API: call ${OPENROUTER_BASE_URL}/chat/completions with a bearer token from OPENROUTER_API_KEY.

Whichever client you use, you can find model IDs to pass in the OpenRouter models directory.

Note that a model listed in OpenRouter’s directory will not work through the AI Gateway if it does not support a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) policy since Netlify only routes to OpenRouter providers with this support.

To learn more about using AI Gateway, check out our official AI Gateway Netlify docs.

Through a new partnership with OpenRouter, you can now choose OpenCode as an AI agent with Agent Runners. OpenCode allows you to choose many different AI models, including Kimi, DeepSeek, and GLM.

Learn more about our OpenRouter partnership through the Netlify blog on open models.

Previously, you could only choose Claude, Gemini, or Codex as your AI agent, but now you can choose the OpenCode agent, which offers even more models from different AI providers.

Requests made through OpenCode are only routed to model providers with a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) policy, so your prompts and outputs are never stored.

AI model selection

As part of this release, you can now also specify which model any agent uses with Agent Runners. Previously, Claude, Gemini, and Codex agents all automatically chose a model for the task you prompted with Agent Runners.

Agents can still auto-select a model for you, but now you can also choose different models for your agents, with these preferences saved just for you on your device.

This means you can experiment with which AI models best fit your needs.

To open your AI model options for Agent Runners, select agent near your prompt box.

Choosing the best AI model for your needs

To help you choose the best AI model for your needs, within Agent Runners you can browse details about each model, including a link to learn more, a visual way to compare cost across all supported models with a 1-5 dot scale, and the option to set an effort level for that model.

To get the most out of your credits, consider the following strategies:

• Use a more expensive, capable model to help you plan your project updates and design a clear prompt with Agent Runners’ ask mode, then switch to a cheaper model to implement the changes.
• Experiment with using different AI models for different tasks.
• Be explicit about the functionality you want when using models that are cheaper or set to a lower effort level. These models may fill in placeholder functionality. For example, a model might render a contact page without fully setting up working Netlify Forms, so the page looks complete but doesn’t actually work as expected.

Learn more

To learn more, check out our docs:

• Agent Runners overview
• Make changes with Agent Runners

Netlify Agent Runners now have a mode selector. Pick Ask and the agent reads, investigates, and answers questions about your project. Build is still the default and works exactly as before.

Ask mode is strictly read-only. The agent can’t edit files, run commands, deploy, or change settings. With no build or Deploy Preview, Ask runs are often faster and use fewer credits.

It answers with real context: your repository, your project context, and your project’s Netlify Database. Your data is often the fastest way to answer a question about your app, and Ask mode can query it with no risk of a write.

A few prompts to steal:

• “How many users are in the database?”
• “Walk me through how authentication is implemented in this project. Which files handle it, and where is the token stored?”
• “Our Largest Contentful Paint is bad on mobile. Read the code and tell me what’s most likely responsible.”
• “Plan out how we can migrate to the latest version of Astro.”

Because it’s a mode on the same run, you can switch to Build the moment an answer turns into a task — same run, same context, no re-explaining.

Ask mode is available on all agents, Claude Code, Google Gemini, and OpenAI Codex, in Agent Runners today. See the docs on Ask and Build modes.

GPT-5.6 Luna now costs 80% less and GPT-5.6 Terra is 20% less through Netlify AI Gateway, making both models more cost-efficient for production AI workloads.

These reductions improve the price-performance tradeoff across the GPT-5.6 model family, giving teams more flexibility to choose the right balance of capability and cost for each workload.

Learn more in OpenAI’s announcement, Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT-5.6.

We have redesigned Netlify functions for an improved agent experience.

With these updates, functions are more discoverable, easier to autocomplete, update, and manage for people and agents alike. They move function configuration into code, making it type-safe and immediately visible to editors, tools, and agents, with no platform-specific naming conventions to memorize or get wrong. None of these changes are breaking, so you can adopt them on your own timeline.

Netlify Functions are serverless functions that run on-demand in response to HTTP requests or platform events. They handle server-side logic without any infrastructure to manage, and live in your repository at netlify/functions/.

To learn more about these updates in depth, check out our blog on redesigning Netlify functions for agent experience. See the table below for a summary.

Learn more in the Netlify Functions documentation, which has also been recently revamped.

Netlify is now listed in the Cursor marketplace, so you can connect your AI-assisted coding environment directly to Netlify without leaving your editor.

Whether you’re spinning up a new project or iterating on an existing site, having Netlify available from within Cursor means fewer context switches between building and deploying.

Find it at cursor.com/marketplace/netlify.

Agent Runners now include a frontend-design skill that guides AI agents toward creating distinctive, production-grade frontend interfaces with high design quality.

When building web components, pages, or applications, AI agents often default to generic, cookie-cutter aesthetics. The frontend-design skill steers agents toward creative, polished output that avoids that “AI slop” look and instead produces UIs with real visual identity and craft.

Here’s what a generated calculator component looks like without the skill:

And here’s the same prompt with the frontend-design skill enabled:

The skill is automatically available in Agent Runners and activates when the agent is asked to build web components, pages, or applications. No configuration required—just prompt your agent to build a UI and the skill handles the rest.

Learn more about Agent Runners and available skills in the Netlify docs.

We’ve improved the Netlify CLI’s Agent Experience to make it the fastest way for both developers and AI agents to go from idea to deployed site. Here’s what’s new.

Create a new project from a prompt

The netlify create command now builds you a new site from scratch, triggering Agent Runners:

netlify create "a landing page for a SaaS product with a waitlist signup"

This single command will:

• Create a new Netlify project for you
• Deploy it to a live URL
• Pull down the code so you can start iterating locally

Prefer to build with GitHub? The Netlify CLI can also create a new GitHub repo and automatically hook it up to your new Netlify project, no manual setup required.

Deploy without an account

Need to spin up something quick without creating an account first or signing in? The new --allow-anonymous flag lets you deploy without a Netlify account:

netlify deploy --allow-anonymous

This will create the project, deploy it to a live URL, and let you claim the project within an hour. This is especially useful for AI agents that need to create temporary projects without requiring Netlify credentials upfront.

Better agent experience throughout

We’ve resolved the major issues agents commonly hit with the CLI. The CLI is now a more predictable integration point whether you’re building with an AI coding assistant or orchestrating your own agents.

Install or update the Netlify CLI to try it out:

npm install -g netlify-cli@latest

You can now deploy sites to Netlify directly from OpenAI Codex using the Netlify plugin in the Codex plugin directory.

Codex plugins extend Codex with apps, skills, and MCP servers, to access external tools, data, and workflows directly from your coding environment. With the Netlify plugin, Codex can create projects, configure settings, and deploy without leaving the coding workflow.

What you can do

Deploy directly from Codex

• Deploy projects using the Netlify CLI workflow
• Generate preview URLs automatically
• Deploy to production when ready
• Validate build configuration before deployment

Manage your projects

• Create new projects
• Install extensions
• Manage environment variables
• Configure visitor access controls
• Manage forms
• Update project settings

Review and fix deployments

• Inspect deploy status
• Retrieve build logs
• Identify configuration issues
• Iterate on fixes within Codex

Codex is also available through Agent Runners, where you can prompt AI agents against your live project and deploy changes directly from the Netlify Dashboard.

The Netlify plugin for Codex is available now in the Codex plugin directory.