Mind Router
One model choice per turn, scored and banded, with the option to pin a model whenever you want.
Most turns in a session do not need the strongest model. A few do, and nothing weaker will get them right. Mind Router scores each turn, places it in a band, and sends it to a model that can do that work. You pick a mode once; the router does the rest, and records what it decided.
How it works
- Score the turn. A scorer reads the shape of the work — never the prompt text, which is deliberately not stored — and produces a score.
- Pick a band. The score maps to trivial, standard or complex, with thresholds per mode.
- Ask again when it is close. A turn sitting right at a boundary could belong either side, so a classifier gives a second opinion. That costs another round-trip, so it only happens near a boundary.
- Respect the floor. A turn that uses tools, or continues work already under way, is never downgraded mid-session.
- Route and record. Every routed turn is tagged with its band, score and category, so you can see later why a model was chosen.
Bands
| Band | Typical work | Routed to |
|---|---|---|
| trivial | Greetings, acknowledgements, lookups | A small, fast model |
| standard | Everyday edits, tests, explanations | A mid-weight coding model |
| complex | Refactors, architecture, hard debugging | The strongest model available to your plan |
Modes
A mode is selected the same way any model is — through the picker — and is saved in your config. Each one is its own virtual model ID.
- Default (mindcode/router) balances capability against cost on every turn.
- Balance (mindcode/router-balance) leans towards capability when a turn is ambiguous.
- Intelligence (mindcode/router-intelligence) prefers the strongest model wherever it would plausibly help.
auto, router, auto-balance and auto-intelligence all resolve to the same routes.
Pinning a model
Routing is a default, not a cage. Pick any model in the picker and the session uses it for every turn until you switch back to a router mode. Pinned turns are recorded as pinned, so they are easy to spot in the ledger.
Cost and plans
Each turn is billed at the list price of the model that actually served it, so the band a turn lands in is what determines its cost. Which models the router can reach depends on your plan; when a band's first choice is unavailable, the router falls back to the strongest model your plan allows.
What gets recorded
For each routed turn the ledger keeps the band, the score, the category and the model that served it. The prompt text is never stored. That record is what lets a fitted scorer replace the default one later without changing a single call site.
turn #14 band complex score 0.82 category refactor turn #15 band trivial score 0.21 category lookup