If you route through OpenRouter with openrouter/auto, you've traded a decision for a convenience. The router picks a model per request based on price, latency, and availability, and most of the time it picks well. The catch is that "most of the time" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and you don't find out which model handled a given request until you go looking.
This matters more than it used to. Agents like OpenClaw and a growing pile of internal tools default to auto precisely because they don't want to hard-code a model. That's reasonable. But it means a single agent loop can fan out across three or four different models in an afternoon, each with its own per-token price, and your only signal is an aggregate bill at the end of the month. When the bill is surprising, "which model, on which request, for which developer" is exactly the breakdown you don't have.
Here's how to get it back without rearchitecting anything.
The data is already there
OpenRouter records the model it selected on every completion, even when you asked for auto. You don't need to intercept traffic to see this. The platform exposes it two ways.
