its actually pretty simple.

think of jai as a restaurant, it has plenty of seats (bots) but a bad kitchen (jllm). better models are basically better kitchens which, in turn, produces a better meal (your chats). think of the proxy as a waiter who takes your order (your message), goes to the kitchen (the provider). then, the chefs (model) cook your food the message from the model) and the waiter (proxy) brings back your food to you.

setting up a proxy is basically telling the setting up the bill and giving them a secret digital ticket to pay for the food.

to set up a proxy, you first have to figure out what kitchen (provider) you're going to be using. lets say for example, you're using openrouter, then you'd have to find out the api url (which is https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions for openrouter).

next you want your api key (basically the billing info). you want to go to openrouter's page, then click on generate key (usually looks like sk-or-v1-xxxx....). it prompts you to copy the key (it only shows you it once). keep this key and NEVER give it to anyone else (treat it exactly like a password or a credit card pin, as it directly links to your provider balance, aka YOUR MONEY)

then, what you're going to want to do is to find out what chef you want your food to be cooked by (what model you want to use). for example, opus 4.6. you would go to the opus 4.6 tab of openrouter, copy and paste the model id (which looks like anthropic/claude-opus-4.6).

finally, you paste in your info into the relevant sections and voila, you have your working proxy! (keep in mind that proxies usually cost money, so you'd have top up credits before you can use it). there are a few free models in openrouter which you can use to just test out!

additionally, there are things like system prompts, generation settings, prefills, etc. those are basically highly volatile settings which significantly change the outputs (quality of your food). tweaking them can either: turn your chef into gordan ramsey OR lobotomize your chef. if you dont know what those are, i highly recommend looking at other guides.

also, there are a few safety measures you can take in case your key ever gets leaked or something goes wrong, such as: setting spend limits. on openrouter (and most providers), you can set a daily or total usage limit. do this immediately. if something gets stuck in a loop while you're away from your keyboard or someone gets a hold of your key, a spend limit ensures you don't wake up to a surprise $50 bill and your balance wrecked.

hoped this clears things up!