https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx3gX7ZSC9c
TL;DR – Stop guessing which LLM is “best” for every prompt. Requesty Smart Routing automatically classifies each task (code, chat, SQL, creative writing, etc.) in ~50 ms and forwards it to the optimal model (GPT-4o, Claude-3, Gemini-Flash, DeepSeek, Mistral-Large, you name it). One API key, zero context-switching, up to 80 % cost-savings and consistent latency.
1. Why We Built Smart Routing
Even power users struggle to juggle the expanding LLM zoo:
| Task | “Best” model today | Tokens / $1 | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short chit-chat | Gemini-Flash-2.5 | ~3 000 | ⚡ Fast |
| Mid-sized coding | Claude-4 Sonnet | ~1 100 | 🟡 Medium |
| Long-form blog | GPT-4o | ~240 | 🔴 Slow |
Tomorrow the table changes again.
Developers either (a) hard-code a single premium model and overpay, or (b) expose end-users to an intimidating “Pick your engine” drop-down. Both hurt UX and margins.
Smart Routing removes that decision entirely.
2. How It Works (Under the Hood)
- Task Classifier A compact, in-house transformer (≈65 M params, distilled from 50 k annotated examples) inspects the system + user prompt and predicts a task label in 20–100 ms. Example labels:
chat_small,code_medium,sql,creative_long,image_insight. - Policy Engine A YAML/JSON policy maps each label to:
- Preferred model(s)
- Budget ceiling
- Max latency SLA
- Fallback chain yamlCopyEditcode_medium: primary: "anthropic/claude-4-sonnet" fallback: ["openai/gpt-4o-mini", "mistral/mixtral-8x7b"] max_usd: 0.005 # per request max_latency_ms: 20000
- Router Gateway The same endpoint you’re already using:
https://router.requesty.ai/v1/chat/completionsSimply setmodel: "smart-task"(or any alias you choose) and pass your prompt. The gateway:
- Calls the classifier
- Consults policy
- Forwards to the chosen provider
- Logs everything in Live Logs & Analytics
- Observability Loop Every response is tagged with
chosen_model,tokens,latency_ms, andcost_usd. These metrics feed back into policy tuning and your dashboards.
3. Live Demo Recap
In the launch video we:
- Connected OpenWebUI to
router.requesty.ai/v1with the alias smart-task. - Asked “Who built you?” → Router picked Gemini-Flash in 2.8 s for under $0.001.
- Asked “Code a Snake game in Python.” → Router switched to Claude-4 Sonnet.
- Follow-up “Write a blog post about this Snake game.” → Router used Perplexity Sonar-Pro (fast, cheap long-form).
Three requests, three providers, zero manual switches.
Latency tax: ~65 ms average over 1 000 runs – imperceptible to humans.
4. Key Benefits
| 💡 | What you get | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| One API, all models | No more env-var gymnastics or vendor-specific SDKs. | Faster prototyping, simpler back-end. |
| Automatic cost trimming | Cheaper models handle lightweight tasks. | Teams report 40-80 % savings. |
| Consistent UX | Users never face “Model selector anxiety”. | Higher retention, fewer support tickets. |
| Live analytics | Per-task spend, latency, error rates. | Data to renegotiate budgets or tweak prompts. |
| No vendor lock-in | Swap vendors via config, not code. | Future-proof as new models drop weekly. |
5. Smart Routing vs. DIY Prompt Engineering
| Manual approach | Requesty Smart Routing | |
|---|---|---|
| Effort | Build & host classifier, maintain policies, integrate N SDKs. | Plug & play |
| Coverage | Depends on your data set. | 50 k-prompt corpus, updated monthly. |
| Edge cases | You chase moving target alone. | We ship global fixes once for everyone. |
| Observability | Stitch together logs from each provider. | Unified Live Logs & Analytics. |
6. Quick Start
curl https://router.requesty.ai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $REQUESTY_API_KEY" \
-d '{
"model": "smart-task",
"messages": [
{"role":"user","content":"Generate a SQL query to find the 5 most active users last month"}
]
}'That’s literally it. 💫
7. Road-Map Sneak Peek
- Reinforcement Learning loop – We’ll let your app vote 👍/👎 so the router learns your domain-specific preferences.
- Fine-grained policy UI – Non-dev teammates can tweak cost limits and fallbacks without touching YAML.
- Hybrid local-+-cloud routing – Seamlessly blend on-prem models with cloud giants.
8. Try It Today
- 🆓 $6 in credits for every new workspace → requesty.ai
- 📺 Watch the 2-min demo in the launch post
- 🐙 Star us on GitHub (open-sourcing the policy spec soon)
- 💬 Join our Discord to suggest new routing rules or models
Stop debating “which model should I use?” — let Requesty decide in real time and focus on building products your users love.
- SEP '26
Jev, week two: 1,316 posts, four gateways giving it away, and an open weight clone trained on one GPU
TypeSafe's decision model launched on 15 September. By 22 September our tracker had 1,316 posts from 965 authors, the daily count had plateaued near 280, Vercel and Lovable had both made it free for a week, OpenRouter had benchmarked it at five times the speed of the next fastest judge, and r/LocalLLaMA had shipped three open weight imitations. Here is what builders did with a model that refuses to chat, what they complained about, and how to evaluate one for your own pipeline.
- MAR '25
Introducing Smart Routing: Smart AI Model Selection!
- OCT '26
We benchmarked the decision models: Clef on Sference vs Cloudflare, Perplexity's decider, and eight LLMs on 22,000 decisions
Three decision models are now live on Requesty. We ran 22,000 decisions through the production router to answer three questions: is Clef on Sference the same model as Clef on Cloudflare, how do decision models score on public gold labels, and how do they compare with LLMs prompted for JSON on cost, latency, refusals and accuracy.
