gabrielmoreira Compute Ladder
Tier Definitions
Tier 0 — Local (never dies, zero cost)
ollama/qwen3-coder:latest primary, MoE, 128 TPS, 64k ctx
ollama/gpt-oss:20b fallback, 32k ctx HARD LIMIT
Tier 1 — Fast Free Cloud (up to 2100 TPS)
cerebras/qwen-3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507 235B MoE, fast free
cerebras/llama3.1-8b 8B, ultra-fast light tasks
Tier 2 — Free Cloud (normal latency)
openrouter/z-ai/glm-4.5-air
openrouter/qwen/qwen3-coder
Tier 3 — Free Cloud Deep Reasoning
openrouter/nousresearch/hermes-3-llama-3.1-405b:free
Tier 4 — Break-Glass (paid, restricted use)
openrouter/anthropic/claude-opus-4.6 [narco-check and audit ONLY]
Fallback Rules
DO fallback when:
- HTTP 429 (rate limited)
- Connection timeout (> 90s)
- Stream death / incomplete response
DO NOT fallback when:
- Task seems "complex" or "important"
- You want "better" output quality
- Previous attempt gave a poor answer
Use the primary model. Iterate. Fallback is for infrastructure failure, not preference.
Health Check
# Tier 0
curl -s localhost:11434/api/tags | python3 -c "import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin); print('TIER-0 OK:', len(d['models']), 'models')"
# Tier 1
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $CEREBRAS_API_KEY" \
https://api.cerebras.ai/v1/models
# Tier 4
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models
Cost Guard
# Check today's OpenRouter spend
curl -s "https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/auth/key" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
| python3 -c "
import json,sys
d=json.load(sys.stdin)['data']
print(f'today: \${d[\"usage_daily\"]:.2f} | week: \${d[\"usage_weekly\"]:.2f} | month: \${d[\"usage_monthly\"]:.2f}')
"
Daily > $5: flag to Ludo. Weekly > $50: flag immediately — tier-4 model is likely being over-used.