How I built a harness-agnostic model router for Cursor and Claude Code and what broke along the way.
When you use Claude Sonnet for everything in Cursor, you pay premium prices for work a local Llama could handle in two seconds. When you use only Ollama, you get worse results on architecture reviews and multi-step refactors.
I wanted a middle layer: cheap by default, escalate when the task actually needs it. Not a new chatbot, a dispatcher the existing agent could call for subtasks.
That layer became Maestro AI.
The mental model
