Routing (Agent Pattern)

In depth

A workflow where an LLM or classifier first labels an incoming request, then sends it to a prompt, tool set, or model built for that category. Typical uses are splitting customer support traffic into general questions, refunds, and technical issues, or sending easy queries to a small, cheap model and hard ones to a more capable model. Routing works when the categories are distinct and easy to classify. A misrouted request goes down the wrong path, and nothing in the pattern brings it back.

Primary source: anthropic.com