H-16Router / Model Cascade

A cheap triage step picks the model; a quality check escalates only what needs escalating.

Key insight

Most traffic is easy. Routing lets you price for the median request instead of the worst one, and a failed cheap attempt is still cheap.

Failure mode

A router that costs as much as what it routes to. If triage needs the big model to decide, the cascade has bought latency and nothing else.

Elsewhere in the atlas