The AI coding agent space has spent the last year arguing about which model is best. Factory just shipped a feature that makes the question moot: let the router decide. The company behind Droid, the autonomous coding agent that runs across Slack, desktop, CLI, CI, and even SSH from a phone, has rolled out Factory Router, a model-routing layer that picks an LLM per session, fails over when providers degrade, and reserves dedicated throughput for enterprise customers.

The pitch is simple. Instead of forcing engineers to manually choose between Claude, GPT, Gemini, or open-source alternatives for every task, Factory Router makes that decision automatically based on task complexity, then re-routes if anything breaks downstream.

Why a router, why now

Factory has been explicit about its bet on model agnosticism. Droid is model agnostic and can change models mid-session, with models from all major providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and NVIDIA. The new router operationalizes that flexibility at the org level rather than leaving it to individual engineers.

The cost story is the headline. Factory Router cuts token spend by 20-25% while maintaining frontier performance by automatically selecting the right model for each task and routing across providers if an endpoint degrades. On benchmarks, the routing approach holds up: 99% of Claude Opus 4.7's pass rate on Terminal-Bench 2 at 20% lower cost per session, and 96% of Opus 4.7's pass rate on Legacy-Bench at 25% lower cost per session.