Albatross

Albatross is an open source coding agent that runs in the terminal and routes each task across several models at the execution layer. A selector model assigns low, medium or high tiers for the orchestrator and coder roles, adds review and security models, and switches the active coding model accordingly. Every routing decision is written to an auditable ledger that records which model was chosen, why, and what it cost, and the ledger can be replayed, explained and totalled from inside the session. It suits developers who want direct control over which models touch their code and what they spend. Local backends include Ollama, LM Studio, MLX and llama.cpp, and cloud backends include Anthropic, OpenRouter, OpenAI and Grok, all used with the developer's own keys and switchable mid session without changing tools, commands or the session log. Alongside the usual read, edit, grep, shell and test tools, it offers a real undo that reverts the last turn's file changes, including files the agent created or that were untracked; session paths that branch the conversation and workspace so two fixes can be compared and the better one picked without a git worktree; and an iterate loop in which a separate critic agent scores each pass against a rubric. The status line shows the cost of each cloud turn and the running session total, and token counts for local turns. Albatross is free and released under the MIT license, installed through Homebrew. There is no paid plan or pricing page; the only costs are whatever the chosen cloud providers charge on the user's own API keys. The project is written in Rust and optimized for Apple Silicon, and the site lists version 2.1.0 as current.