Why We Shut Down Our LLM Router After 4 Months and 7,000 Users
nuno6Varnish · reddit · 2026-07-31
After 4 months of usage across 7,000 cloud users, the development team decided to shut down their LLM router and stick to a single model.
The team reached the following core conclusions:
- Complexity cannot be deduced from the prompt alone: Routers struggle to accurately assess the actual load of a request.
- Cache is more effective than routing: Hitting the cache yields far greater cost reduction benefits than routing allocation.
- Behavior consistency is broken: Switching between different models leads to instability in output style and logic.
- Unpredictability has a cost: The uncertainty introduced by routing increases the overhead of system maintenance and debugging.
Related event: Manifest Abandons LLM Router, Returns to Single Model(5 posts)→
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