RouteLLM stack routes local, premium models

This is the right kind of scrappy AI engineering: treat model choice like request routing, not ideology.

• –RouteLLM was built for exactly this strong-model/weak-model split, and LMSYS says its routers can cut costs sharply while retaining most top-model quality on common benchmarks
• –Pairing Ollama with a paid fallback creates a local-first assistant that degrades gracefully instead of failing outright when the premium path is unavailable
• –The weakest link is policy and ops risk, since the original Copilot-plus-OpenWire idea was already flagged by the author as a TOS problem and swapped for a normal API-key path
• –OpenClaw makes the setup more interesting than a simple chat proxy because the routed endpoint can sit behind an always-on personal agent surface