NadirClaw 0.8: Vision Routing and the Silent Failure It Fixed

Here's a bug that's annoying to diagnose: you send a screenshot to Cursor, get a response that clearly didn't look at the image. You try again. Same thing. You figure it's a model issue and move on.

If you're running NadirClaw in front of Cursor, the bug was in the router.

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How NadirClaw routes requests

Before 0.8, here's what happened when you sent an image:

1. NadirClaw's classifier embeds your prompt using sentence embeddings and compares it to two pre-computed centroid vectors (one for "simple", one for "complex"). This takes ~10ms. No extra API call.
2. Your screenshot is probably attached to a short message like "what's wrong here?" - that classifies as simple.
3. Simple routes to your cheap model. If that's DeepSeek or an Ollama model, neither supports vision.
4. The multimodal content array (the image_url part) got flattened to text before hitting LiteLLM. The image disappeared.
5. DeepSeek answered based on the text alone. Looked wrong. Was wrong.

No error. No log warning. Just a bad answer.

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What 0.8 changes

The model registry now has a has_vision field on every model:

"gemini-2.5-flash":     {"has_vision": True,  "cost_per_m_input": 0.15}
"deepseek/deepseek-chat": {"has_vision": False, "cost_per_m_input": 0.28}
"ollama/llama3.1:8b":   {"has_vision": False, "cost_per_m_input": 0}

When NadirClaw detects image_url or base64 image content in a request, it checks the selected model's has_vision flag. If it's False, it swaps to the cheapest vision-capable model in your configured tiers.

That's usually Gemini Flash ($0.15/M input) rather than Sonnet ($3.00/M) or GPT-5.2 ($1.75/M). You're not paying premium rates for vision, you're paying the cheapest rate that actually works.

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The fix that mattered as much as the routing

Separately from the routing logic, there was a bug: even if you'd manually pointed your image request at a vision-capable model, the content array was still being flattened to text-only before reaching LiteLLM. Both streaming and non-streaming paths.

That's fixed in 0.8. Image content parts now pass through unchanged.

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Upgrade

pip install --upgrade nadirclaw

If you've been getting inconsistent answers on image-heavy requests, this is probably why. Run nadirclaw report after upgrading and look at the has_images field in your request logs to see how often this was silently misfiring.

Full changelog: v0.7.0...v0.8.0

(Full disclosure: I work on this project.)