Replace Coder Auto with Coder Flash and Coder Free, switched by shift+tab under the input bar #131

What to build

Retire Coder Auto. Replace it with two named lanes the reader switches between with shift+tab, and show the current one under the input bar — not at the top of the screen, where the lane is announced today and then scrolls away.

Two lanes, one key, and the answer to "what am I about to spend, and on what" is in the reader's eyeline the whole time rather than in a line that scrolled off twenty turns ago.

Why the top of the screen is the wrong place

The lane is announced once at session open. That is exactly when it is least interesting — nothing has been asked yet — and by the time it matters, it is off screen. A lane is a live fact, not an opening credit: it changes what the next turn costs and which model answers it, and shift+tab means it can change without the reader having done anything memorable.

Coordination — three changes now claim that row

The row under the input bar is contested. Land this after the other two or expect a rebase:

• #130 puts identity there — the account and the endpoint — and evicts the token counts to a new /info.
• #259 (coder autoimprovement lane) puts a credit balance there.
• This issue puts the lane there.

The rule those two settled on, which this should follow: the bottom row is what you can do next; /info is what you already spent. The lane belongs there under that rule — it is the third thing that governs the next turn, alongside who you are and what you can afford. But three fields plus a lane name is a crowded row at 70 columns, so someone has to decide the layout rather than each change appending to it. #130 already reserves 24 columns on the right for the balance; this needs the same treatment, not an append.

Carry the render constraint too: nothing in that row may report a value it did not receive. For a lane that means the effective model, not the requested one. If Coder Flash fell back to Gemini, the row says so — a lane label that keeps saying "Flash" while a fallback is answering is the same defect as a status bar advertising keys it had not wired.

Two things to check before writing code

Lane::OxAlpha is #[default]. crates/openagents-cli/src/runtime.rs:174. The catalog is being rewritten today: glm-5.3-flash becomes the default, and ox-alpha leaves the selectable list — it was the stealth alias for GLM 5.3 Flash and dies now that model has shipped publicly under its own name. So the default lane is about to name a model that is gone. Whatever this issue does with Auto, it must also move that default, or a fresh session opens on a dead id.

coder-lite has no shift+tab handler. No lane_label, no cycle, no BackTab arm in crates/coder-lite/src/interactive.rs. The precedent to read is the TypeScript CLI's cycleTier, which already walks Flash → Pro → Local (packages/openagents-cli/test/coder-tiers.test.ts). The Rust Lane enum in runtime.rs:174 currently carries Auto, OxAlpha, Flash, Pro, Named, Local — so this is not a new field so much as a decision about which variants survive and what the two survivors are called.

Confirm, don't guess

"Gemini 3.7 Flash" and openrouter/free need their exact ids read off the live catalog before they are written down. GET /api/v1/models is the authority. A fallback that names an id the gateway does not serve fails at the worst possible moment — when the primary is already down — and this repo has shipped a fallback list with a dead entry in it before. Same for thinkingmachines/inkling: confirm the id, then decide separately what the reader sees, which is "Inkling".

Done means

• Shift+tab switches between Coder Flash and Coder Free, and the row under the input bar changes as it does.
• The row names the model that actually answered, including after a fallback.
• No surface still says "Coder Auto".
• A fresh session does not open on ox-alpha.
• Tests assert the rendered frame — that the two lanes read differently from each other and from a fallback — not that the label renders something.