Keep conversations on-device (local-only failover)
If you run MIRA on a local model (LM Studio, Ollama, or a self-hosted OpenAI-compatible endpoint) for privacy, you don’t want a crash or timeout to quietly ship the conversation to a cloud API. MIRA is fail-closed by default: its automatic failover only ever falls back to local providers.
What “local-only” means
Section titled “What “local-only” means”When your primary model fails mid-turn, MIRA tries the next provider in its
failover chain. By default that chain contains only local providers —
LM Studio, Ollama, and an OpenAI-compatible endpoint whose URL is a
loopback / private / .local address. Cloud providers (OpenAI, Anthropic,
Gemini, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Groq, xAI, Moonshot) are never used as a
silent automatic fallback unless you explicitly add them.
If every local provider is down and no cloud fallback is configured, MIRA returns a clear error — it does not reach for the cloud to “save” the turn.
Cloud providers stay fully usable for explicit choices: picking a cloud model for a specific message still works. Only the silent, automatic fallback is restricted.
Configure the chain
Section titled “Configure the chain”Settings → Providers → Automatic failover.
- Your primary provider is pinned at the top.
- Below it, the enabled fallbacks in priority order — drag to reorder, remove with ✕.
- Local providers are enabled by default; cloud providers are off.
- Enabling a cloud provider shows an amber warning: ⚠️ conversations sent to {provider} (cloud) — turning it on is a deliberate, eyes-open choice.
Under the hood this is the failover_providers setting: an ordered list of
provider slugs.
- Unset (default) → local-only (the safe default).
- A list → exactly those providers, in that order.
- An empty list → no automatic fallback at all (hard fail-closed — the primary or nothing).
Behaviour change note
Section titled “Behaviour change note”Before this feature, MIRA’s automatic failover would walk through every configured provider, including cloud ones. It is now local-only by default for all installs. If you previously relied on automatic cloud failover, re-enable those providers in Settings → Providers → Automatic failover (with the privacy trade-off shown).