route-work-to-the-right-model

Route work to the right model

Deciding how much validation a change needs, per change, in the moment, is how teams end up validating nothing.

The decision always gets made under pressure, by the person who most wants the answer to be "not much". So it is made in advance, from the kind of work, by a table you can read and argue with when nothing is on fire.

Ask it

validated-memory route "what you are about to do" [--path FILE ...] [--json]

Running from the installed plugin, where the CLI is not on PATH:

PYTHONPATH="${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}" python3 -m validated_memory route "what you are about to do"

It answers with a level, the number of validations, which agents, which model, and which effort. It exits 0 always: this advises, it does not gate.

$ validated-memory route "small tweak to the checkout flow" --path src/billing/refund.py
Level 3 — 3 validations

  matched money: billing, checkout, refund
  matched touched path: billing

  model   : opus
  effort  : high
  agents  : security-reviewer, data-reviewer, devils-advocate

  Three, and the devil's advocate has to actively try to break it.

"Small tweak" is a description of intent. The paths and the words are a description of risk, and only one of those two decides.

The three levels

Level	Kind of work	Validations	Model	Effort
1	Cosmetic, documentation, anything that never reaches production	1	small	low
2	Production code, service config, CI, dependencies	2 independent	mid	medium
3	Auth, permissions, money, customer data, migrations, network, certificates, deletions	3, one trying to break it	large	high

The one hard rule

Nothing at level 3 runs on the small model.

Saving tokens is worth it exactly where being wrong is cheap. It is never worth it where being wrong means an outage, a breach, or someone's money. That rule is asserted in code, not left to good intentions — see route.py and the tests that pair every level-3 phrase against the model it was given.