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Monad’s gateway is a “gateway of gateways”: every provider is one place a request can be sent. The set of providers Monad offers out of the box is defined once, in a single catalog, and every layer (init wizard, CLI, Model Settings, the agent-core registry) derives from it.

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The catalog is the source of truth

The provider catalog in packages/atoms/src/providers/catalog.ts maps each ModelProviderType to a ProviderCatalogEntry: A compile-time Record<ModelProviderType, …> and unit tests (protocol control.test.ts, atoms providers.test.ts) assert the catalog covers exactly KNOWN_PROVIDER_TYPES, so the enum and the catalog can’t drift.

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The two strategies

The strategy field is the mechanism that decides how a provider’s model is built. Both strategies are bundled and registered at startup — there is no runtime download.
  • native — a dedicated AI SDK package, one provider module in packages/atoms/src/providers/. Used only for providers that genuinely need their own SDK: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter (its own @openrouter/ai-sdk-provider), Vercel AI Gateway, Google Gemini, Mistral, Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI.
  • openai-compatible — the bundled @ai-sdk/openai-compatible adapter pointed at the catalog’s defaultBaseUrl. This covers the entire long tail (Groq, xAI, DeepSeek, Together, Fireworks, Cerebras, Perplexity, Moonshot, Z.AI, MiniMax, NVIDIA, Novita, Ollama, Hugging Face) with zero extra dependencies — they are presets, generated from the catalog in providers/index.ts.

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Adding a provider

  • OpenAI-compatible endpoint → add one ModelProviderType enum member + one PROVIDER_CATALOG entry (strategy: 'openai-compatible', defaultBaseUrl). That’s it — the registry, wizard, CLI, and settings pick it up automatically. Add a logo in apps/web/src/lib/ProviderMeta.tsx.
  • Needs a distinct SDK → also add the package to apps/monad/package.json and a provider module, then register it in providers/index.ts.

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Auth model

22 of the 24 providers are exactly base URL + token and fit the credential model ({ accessToken, authType: 'api_key', baseUrl }). Two natives carry extra requirements: Provider credentials are native Monad settings stored directly on their provider in agents.json. They are redacted from settings responses and never use auth.json, ${secret:...}, or the Agent Runtime Credentials registry.
  • Azure OpenAI — needsUrl: true; the user supplies a resource base URL (https://{resource}.openai.azure.com/openai/v1) + an api-key, and the model id is the Azure deployment name.
  • Amazon Bedrock — requires an AWS region (an extraField stored in Provider.extra) and authenticates with a bearer API key (ABSK…). SigV4 (two-secret) is out of scope.
Bedrock and Azure have no standard bearer /models route, so the wizard and CLI fall back to a manual model-id entry when a connection test returns no models.

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Why there’s no runtime/dynamic download

A natural idea is to fetch a provider’s npm package (or its prebuilt dist) at runtime when a user selects it. We deliberately don’t, because:
  1. dist is compiled, not bundled. It still imports bare specifiers (@ai-sdk/provider, @ai-sdk/provider-utils, zod), so using it means recursively resolving the whole dependency tree at runtime — reimplementing a package manager.
  2. Shared spec version. The AI SDK pins a specificationVersion; a downloaded provider must share the same @ai-sdk/provider copy as the host ai runtime or the model object is rejected. CDN bundles (esm.sh ?bundle) duplicate that peer and drift.
  3. Supply chain. Executing network-fetched code inside the key-holding daemon has no lockfile, integrity check, or audit.
Since the long tail is OpenAI-compatible, “installing” those providers requires no package at all — they’re presets over an adapter we already bundle.

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Third-party atom packs (the supported extension point)

Genuinely custom providers are still supported, unchanged, via drop-in atom pack files: place a .js module that default-exports a ModelProvider (or an array of them) into ~/.monad/atoms/providers/. The daemon discovers and watches that directory (registry.discover(dir) + watchProviders() in apps/monad/src/services/model.ts), so the atom pack registers without a restart. The atom pack contract is documented in provider.ts.