GUIDE

Agent Routing: Choose the Smallest Model That Can Finish the Job

How routing policies improve cost and reliability without turning model selection into guesswork.

model routingAI cost optimizationagent architecture

Why this matters

Routing is a product policy: the system should know when speed, reasoning depth or determinism matters most.

The practical takeaways

  • Route by task type and risk, not by model popularity.
  • Use a small evaluation set to tune thresholds.
  • Keep an escalation path for uncertain cases.

How to apply it

Start with one measurable workflow, define the failure boundary, and publish the result with enough context for another builder to reproduce the decision. The goal is not to chase every announcement; it is to turn useful changes into better products, skills and deployment practice.

Editorial note

This is an original FDE editorial synthesis based on the linked source. It is not a translation or reproduction of the source article.