Routing controls and decision review

Once the benchmark evidence is in place, Router controls become meaningful.

What /app/router/strategy actually controls

The runtime strategy page is doing more than choosing a single weight preset.

It owns:

• the persisted runtime routing mode such as baseline, controller, difficulty, or hybrid
• the execution mode such as hybrid, local_only, remote_only, or decision_only
• the saved runtime posture that later requests should inherit

That means operators should stop thinking of this page as only "balanced vs latency vs cost."

Save strategy after benchmarking

The operator flow should be:

1. configure the candidate set
2. run the full benchmark
3. review the outcomes
4. save the routing strategy

This keeps strategy selection evidence-based instead of guess-based.

Where to verify the result

After saving the strategy, use:

• Router to inspect candidates, decisions, fallbacks, and strategy posture
• Observe to inspect the request and telemetry trail around live traffic

Read /router/strategy-modes-and-tradeoffs for scoring weights and /router/routing-modes-locality-and-execution for runtime mode plus local/remote execution scope.

What you want to confirm

• the saved strategy is visible in decision context
• the winner is consistent with benchmark quality and policy intent
• fallback order looks sane
• the request trail in Observe supports the Router story

Strategy-specific checks

After saving:

• balanced: confirm the winner looks like the healthiest overall choice, not just the fastest or cheapest
• quality: confirm benchmark-backed quality actually explains the winner
• latency: confirm measured latency and throughput explain the winner without obvious quality collapse
• cost: confirm budget and cost evidence explain the winner instead of accidental missing-metric behavior

Also confirm the larger runtime posture:

• if execution mode is local_only, no remote endpoint should appear as the real execution winner
• if execution mode is remote_only, local candidates should not be the actual execution path
• if routing mode is difficulty, request diagnostics should show difficulty classification
• if routing mode is hybrid, the final decision should make it possible to understand whether controller guidance, difficulty signals, or both dominated

Operational rule of thumb

If Router and Observe tell different stories, investigate before tuning weights or swapping models. The first problem is usually inventory, role activation, endpoint health, or evidence freshness rather than strategy selection itself.