Overview

The Router layer is where role-model turns a role-aware request and a configured endpoint set into an explainable decision.

What Router is responsible for

Router answers four questions:

1. which endpoints are even allowed to compete
2. which endpoints are excluded and why
3. how the remaining candidates compare
4. why the final winner and fallback order were chosen

The baseline flow

The current baseline does this in order:

1. normalize request intent into the effective policy snapshot
2. narrow the set through role, task, and policy compatibility
3. apply hard eligibility checks
4. score the eligible endpoints using the saved routing strategy
5. break near-ties deterministically
6. emit a RouterDecision

Strategy is part of the comparison stage

The docs now distinguish between two different layers that were previously easy to blur together:

• scoring strategy such as balanced, quality, latency, or cost
• runtime routing mode such as baseline, controller, difficulty, or hybrid

The saved scoring strategy is the policy mode that changes what Router optimizes for once the eligible set is clean.

The four baseline modes are:

• balanced
• quality
• latency
• cost

They all score the same eligible candidates, but they weight quality, latency, throughput, cost, reliability, and preference differently.

Read Scoring strategies and tradeoffs for the weighting guide and Routing modes, locality, and execution for the runtime-mode and local/remote scope guide.

What makes the result useful

Router is not only trying to produce a winner. It is trying to leave behind enough evidence that an operator can inspect the decision later and understand:

• what policy was in force
• what got excluded
• what got ranked
• which measured or declared signals mattered

Read next

• Routing modes, locality, and execution
• Scoring strategies and tradeoffs
• Candidate selection and eligibility
• Scoring, tie-breaks, and decisions
• Fallbacks, failures, and observability