Design decisions¶

Three choices shape the code. Keep them unless you mean to change the decision itself.

No built-in default model¶

Without --model or a saved default, genimg stops and says how to pick a model. A hardcoded default could name a model a fresh key cannot reach, and the very first command would fail. genimg setup offers to save a default, so the guided path still ends in a command with no flags.

No organisation-specific defaults¶

genimg never falls back to a hardcoded GCP project or credential. The Vertex project comes from --project, then the profile's project setting, then GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT, then the service-account file or gcloud. If none is set, genimg says what to set. A hardcoded fallback would be wrong for every user but its author.

Providers are plugins, auth lives in profiles¶

Each backend is a Provider that owns its auth modes, model capabilities, prices and model-id inference, so the CLI, the grid and Draw Studio read the same tables. A few provider-name branches remain outside the providers: OpenAI pricing in cost.py, the OpenAI --mode batch error in cli.py, the suggested model in setup.py and Draw Studio's offline fallback in draw.py.

Each provider and auth mode pair is an AuthProfile. Users pin one as a [profiles.NAME] table in config.toml, which never holds secrets. Without one, genimg uses the first mode whose detection succeeds: an API key in the environment, a gcloud ADC token, or a Codex login.

The full records are in internal/adr/ in the repository.