OpenRouter Caching Strategy

Overview

OpenRouter charges per token, so caching identical or similar requests can dramatically cut costs. Deterministic requests (temperature=0) with the same model and messages produce identical outputs -- these are safe to cache. This skill covers in-memory caching, persistent caching with TTL, and Anthropic prompt caching via OpenRouter.

Prerequisites

• An OpenRouter API key (sk-or-v1-...) exported as OPENROUTER_API_KEY — see the openrouter-install-auth skill for setup
• Python 3.8+ with the OpenAI SDK, plus the redis client package for the persistent cache; Node.js 18+ with the OpenAI SDK for the TypeScript variant in the references
• A Redis server reachable at localhost:6379 for Persistent Cache with Redis (the in-memory LLMCache needs no infrastructure)
• Deterministic request settings — caching is only safe at temperature=0

Instructions