Intent Router

Why

The 2026 frontier converges on one architectural shift: route → strategy → act, replacing the historical one-retriever-for-everything pattern. Different query intents demand categorically different handlers:

• lookup — direct factual recall, single retrieval, small budget
• multi-hop — chain through intermediate facts, deeper retrieval, larger budget
• global — summarise/aggregate across a broad slice, retrieve broadly + compress
• verification — check a claim against evidence, retrieve narrowly + compare
• deep-reason — escalate to a higher-tier model, retrieve generously, allow chain-of-thought
• lexical — exact-match / keyword (BM25 territory), no embedding, narrow budget

The empirical claim: a single fixed strategy is dominated on every axis by the conditional strategy.

How

Before any memory access or multi-strategy retrieval, run a structured-prompt classification pass that returns:

{
  "strategy": "lookup|multi-hop|global|verification|deep-reason|lexical",
  "token_budget": 2000,
  "retrieval_depth": 5,
  "refinement_policy": "none|verbal-rerank|consensus-check",
  "confidence": 0.0
}

If confidence < 0.6, fall back to the broadest strategy (global) so the system degrades gracefully rather than mis-routing.

Output format vs confidence

The full JSON envelope is the canonical form when downstream consumers read it programmatically (typed pipelines, gating code). For inline human-facing routing decisions, taper the ceremony to match the confidence:

• confidence ≥ 0.9 — emit just the strategy label on one line (e.g., route: lexical). The other fields default; don't print the envelope.
• 0.6 ≤ confidence < 0.9 — emit the strategy + 1-line rationale. Skip the JSON.
• confidence < 0.6 — emit the full JSON envelope with the global fallback explicit. This is the only case where the structured output earns its tokens.

Rationale: a CTA audit (.planning/patterns/skill-audits/intent-router-2026-05-16.md) found that high-confidence lexical-class probes produced full JSON envelopes that downstream consumers did not read. The output was surface-anchoring without information gain.

When to skip

• You're already in a typed pipeline whose strategy is fixed (e.g., a search command that's explicitly lexical).
• The query is short enough that the routing call costs more than it saves (rule of thumb: < 20 tokens of question text).
• Scoped exact-match lookup in a known directory — the surface form is so cleanly lexical that classification cannot change the outcome. Triggers: "find files in src/X/ that contain literal string Y", "grep for Z under path/", "list all files referencing IDENT". The routing decision is structurally pinned to lexical; just grep. Added 2026-05-16 from CTA audit (.planning/patterns/skill-audits/intent-router-2026-05-16.md) — the bounded probe showed the routing ceremony added overhead without changing the action.
• You're in a streaming/interactive context where added latency dominates the routing payoff.

Integration

• wrap:execute and wrap:verify — invoke intent-router as the FIRST step in handler dispatch.
• gsd-graphify — already does query routing internally; intent-router exposes the same primitive uniformly to other skills.
• Future src/memory/strategies/ directory will be the typed substrate; this skill is the policy on top.

Cross-references

• Rosetta concept #7 (Intent Routing) — canonical definition
• College: agent-systems / agent-memory / agent-intent-routing
• Related skills: graphify (when query is graph-shaped), gsd-explore (when intent is exploratory)