Companion to Route, don't guess: nine tools crossed the desk during the ten-day build. Not one became a dependency. The reasons why are the actual argument for building it in-house.
Building something in-house invites an obvious question: did you check whether someone already shipped it? A companion project, the one that tracks and evaluates AI tooling for the whole machine, kept an eye out for exactly that, every time an orchestration-shaped tool crossed its desk. The bar it held every candidate to was narrow on purpose: does it add a capability the orchestrator doesn't already have?
Almost nothing cleared it. That's less interesting as a verdict than as a pattern.
The direct comparators
Six candidates were orchestrators or multi-agent harnesses solving the same problem: which model does which task, and how do you trust what comes back.
