Triage is a free-model job

Deciding what to read is a cheaper problem than reading: a one-sentence summary plus a needs-reply flag per item. Skimming twenty long items by hand runs about an hour; reading twenty one-liners and opening only what earned it is about fifteen minutes. On a top-tier paid model that triage volume costs real money every month; on a gateway's free tier it costs nothing (OpenRouter free models, as of 2026-06: 20 requests/minute and 50/day, rising to 1,000/day once $10 of credit has ever been added). Your job is to wire the free lane with a schema strict enough that the output is usable, and to keep anything sensitive out of it.

Steps

1. Confirm the pile fits the caps: daily item count vs. 50/day (or 1,000/day post-credit). Over the cap means batching across days or the cheapest paid model; still pennies.
2. Point any OpenAI-compatible client at https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 with a model whose id ends in :free. That suffix is the contract; without it the "free" triage quietly bills.
3. Pin the output schema to exactly two fields: a string summary and a boolean needs_reply. The boolean is what makes triage actionable: a summary alone still makes the user read everything to find what needs them.
4. Give it one standing instruction ("Summarize in one sentence and flag whether it needs a reply") and run the proof below to validate the config shape.
5. Sort the results: needs-reply items first, everything else skimmable. The user opens what earned it.

Prove it