Cost-Aware Routing Between Model Tiers Becomes Standard in Production Agent Stacks

## Not Every Step Needs the Best Model A production agent workflow often mixes simple, well-defined steps -- classification, formatting -- with genuinely hard reasoning steps. Routing every step to the most capable available model wastes cost on the easy ones. ## The Routing Layer More agent stacks now include an explicit routing layer that sends each step to the cheapest model tier known to handle it reliably, escalating to a larger model only when a cheaper one's confidence is low or a task is flagged as complex. ## The Payoff Teams report meaningful cost reductions from this approach without a corresponding drop in overall task quality, since the hardest steps -- where model capability actually matters most -- still get routed to the strongest available model.