Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor

github.com

61–70 of 127 posts

Re: Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor

#61
post #13

Man, I'm not so sure if I'd use something like this because the way I prompt already changes based upon what model I am using. I'm not convinced it would route to the right model based on my diction or whatever.

> Man, I'm not so sure if I'd use something like this because the way I prompt already changes based upon what model I am using.

Perhaps you're just not the best use case. It may work better when Average Joe is the one prompting.

Re: Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor

#62
I'm glad there are more attempts at solving model routing, as costs (at API rates) has really become an issue. Some feedback:

1. Reiterate the cache issue from other comments already here. there is a lot of optimisation in harnesses around caching and a proxy model blows that up

2. Coding agents are model aware - they already route code discovery to mini / flash models, planning to heavy models, workflow design to ultra, implementation to mid / high etc. They know when they're exploring, planning, implementing, reviewing etc. and which model class to select and when it fails.

With a proxy you're breaking this control loop and feedback. It doesn't know, for ex. that it just attempted with deepseek v4 and it failed, lets try Opus?

3. How are you going to RL improvements and prevent the router becoming stale? You only have access to your own internal prompts and ~thousands of samples.

This is RL'd on one orgs codebase. There are going to be a lot of prompts you haven't seen before and have no insight to on how to route correctly, and you have no insight into users HF to improve your own model. Orgs aren't going to share their traces with you, so you need other sources to train on and improve

There are also new model releases every week that you need to keep up with - whats the story going to be here

4. Publish evals by running terminalbench / deepswe bench. Show us the performance / cost / time chart vs the other agent and model sets. If you can show gains there, you have a very simple value prop to sell where you can charge for a % of the saved costs

Re: Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor

#64
I notice Cursor already does something similar. Even if I have Opus 4.8 selected, it will trigger subagents using Composer 2.5. I like using Auto personally because it is pretty effective and deeply discounted, but at work I YOLO Opus high.

I imagine a solution like this will eventually be an enterprise-forced solution because there is no reason right now for individual developers to be selective about model pricing. Even more important is non-tech users who do stuff through MCPs like "give me a full overview of all analytics" and let it chug for half an hour.

Re: Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor

#67
post #66

Large model companies will likely build this and make it better. It'll also be cheaper overall since they'll be subsidizing token cost if you use them directly vs third party router paying API costs

I would argue they do not have a good incentive to build this and make it better. Why would Anthropic route Claude Code traffic to DeepSeek (at 20% of the cost)?

Re: Show HN: Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor

#68

this is impressive. genuinely better than most people appraoches with using LLM as another judge to help route. which just uses more tokens than saves

Appreciate the kind words! Lmk if you have any feedback on it from using!
Post reply on HN