Router / Dispatch
Classify intent and route to exactly one of N branches: not all. A cheap triage front-door, distinct from Hub & Spoke.
A router agent does one cheap thing well: classify the incoming intent and route it to exactly one of N branches, not all of them. It is a triage front-door, distinct from hub-spoke, which fans out to several specialists and aggregates. The router commits to a single downstream path, so it stays fast and cheap and keeps the expensive machinery behind the branch that actually needs to run. It suits high-volume entry points where most requests have one clear destination. In anatomy terms it is a lightweight classifier core in front of N independent sub-agents.
A lightweight classifier core reads the request and selects exactly one of N downstream branches; unlike a hub it does not aggregate; each branch owns its own effectors; the perimeter gates the branch's writes.
- ·High-volume triage: route a ticket or query to the one handler that fits.
- ·Intent-classification front-doors (support, sales, billing).
- ·Cost control: cheap requests to a cheap path, hard ones to an expensive one.
- ·Cheap and fast: one classification, one path.
- ·Keeps expensive machinery behind the branch that needs it.
- ·Easy to add a new branch.
- ·Clear, auditable single-destination routing.
- ·A wrong classification sends the whole request down the wrong path.
- ·No aggregation: it cannot combine branches (that is hub-spoke).
- ·The router's context caps how many branches it can distinguish.
- ·A miss has no fallback unless one is designed in.
- Internal research (Scalarity), Agents vs Operators / Agent Archetypes v2 · unvalidated
Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.