Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
We built a model router that plugs into coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and intelligently sends requests to the best model to serve them. Here's a quick demo of running it locally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM.At Weave, we write most of our code with AI, and it's been getting more expensive. This came to a head when Opus 4.7 was released and, thanks to its tokenizer changes, our costs shot up. We knew we didn't need Opus for everything but we didn't want to lose out on the intelligence for the cases where you really need it. So we decided to build a model router to handle this for us.The Weave Router acts as an Anthropic/OpenAI endpoint specifically for coding agents. It looks at every inference request and intelligently (more on that in a sec) decides what model to send it to, handling all the translations required along the way. So it can use faster/cheaper models (e.g. DeepSeek v4, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6) when possible, and frontier models (Opus 4.8 & GPT 5.5 (& Fable whenever it's back)) when necessary.How do we know what model to route to? We trained an RL model on tens of thousands (so far!) of agent traces. We reward the routing model when it selects an LLM that successfully completes the given task.Here's an example: if you ask the router to plan a complex change, it will (probably) route that request to Opus 4.8. Subagents exploring the codebase to gather context will be routed to more suitable models (e.g. DeepSeek V4 Flash). Then when you have the plan ready to implement, it will be (most likely) be handed to a quicker model (e.g. GLM 5.2) to carry it out.We've been using this internally for the last month or so. We've saved 40% on tokens vs. what we otherwise would have paid, with no noticeable differences in quality or velocity.The router is source-available under Elastic License 2.0, so you can self-host it. Or if you prefer, you can also use our hosted version: weaverouter.com.I'll be here to answer any questions you may have!
HN · launched Jun 26, 2026 · 216 upvotes (top 4%) · 0 views
Niche: llm routing and gateway tools · 143 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Model & infra
- Developer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 143 launches in llm routing and gateway tools →
Could you build this?
Yes This is a local proxy or MCP server that intercepts coding agent prompts, evaluates complexity with lightweight heuristics or a fast model, and routes to appropriate downstream LLMs.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Claude Code, Anthropic Claude (Opus, Sonnet), Google Gemini, Open source models, GLM 5.x
Concerns raised: Deceptive marketing practices and bait-and-switch on premium features, Poor customer support and account deletion process, Lack of published benchmarks for performance, Cache misses and context switching costs between models, Token costs still prohibitive for large organizations
Feature requests: Router with on-demand compute provisioning and auto-shutdown, Model selection based on cache state and context tracking, Better handling of cache matching to avoid expensive re-fetches, Support for artifact-based workflows with plan handoff between models
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 374 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #38 of 375 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 240 days after the earliest competitor.
- Open-source model routing for coding agents at Astra-level performance · hn · 2026-09-30 · 119 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- Weave Router 2.0 · ph · 2026-09-16 · 333 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- Rayline routes Claude Code subagents to on-device and cheaper models · hn · 2026-06-08 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- We built open OpenRouter that turns usage into a better model · hn · 2026-08-27 · 222 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Millwright · hn · 2026-07-22 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- HarnessRouter: Unified interface for agent harnesses · hn · 2026-08-17 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- FlagshipRouter · github · 2026-10-04 · 58 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- jev-router · github · 2026-09-16 · 245 upvotes · similarity 0.48
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.