The local-first Trust Control Plane for AI. Hydra discovers every model on your machine — CLI agents, API keys, local servers — and routes each task to the cheapest head that clears your target confidence.
Cloud gateways route your traffic through their servers. Eval tools score answers after the fact. Local runtimes each manage only their own models. Plot the field on two axes — hosted↔local and cost-routing↔trust — and one quadrant sits empty. That is where Hydra lives. Hover any star.
Routing isn't vibes. Hydra rides the cost/quality Pareto frontier, stops sampling the instant confidence clears the bar, and reads the code graph to know when a change is dangerous. Here is the actual math.
Single models are dots. For any one of them, Hydra's routed curve reaches equal or better quality at lower cost — it picks the best head per task.
Hydra polls heads until the sequential test (SPRT) crosses your target confidence — then it stops early and banks the unspent heads.
κ = ⟨k²⟩/⟨k⟩. A hub file with many transitive dependents is cascade-capable — so it demands more confidence. Hover a node.
A task is classified, then falls down the ten-tier ladder (red = expensive, green = free/local) to the cheapest head that fits. If that head rate-limits, the fallback fires — terminating at local Qwen, which never runs out.
No tokens-processed arms race. Each of these is something you can reproduce on your own machine with hyctl stats and hyctl probe.
hyctl stats
.hyctl probe
.Cost routing and fallback are table stakes — most tools have them. The differentiators are the rows nobody else can check: local-first, confidence/trust routing, and an on-device accountability ledger.
| Capability | Hydra | OpenRouter | LiteLLM | Portkey |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local-first discovery & routing | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Provider-neutral — routes away from expensive heads | ✓ | partial | partial | partial |
| Automatic fallback chains | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Spend logging & cost reporting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Confidence / trust routing (calibrated + optimal-stopping) | ✓ | — | — | — |
| On-device accountability ledger (PII / local-only policy) | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Runs fully offline (0 network to route) | ✓ | — | — | — |
The interactive agent-tree cockpit is the one roadmap item here — every row checked above ships today in the CLI (hyctl dispatch --confidence
, hyctl graph blast
, hyctl mcp
).
One Go binary. No daemon, no account, no cloud.
Finds every head: CLI agents, API keys, local servers.
Classify → tier → cheapest head that clears confidence.
One cortex, many heads. Route each task to the cheapest head that clears your bar — on your own hardware, with your spend and policy staying home.