Show HN: Hydra, a local-first trust control plane that routes AI by 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 .

Haiku Flash GPT-class all-Claude Hydra routes here Same quality, lower cost — the RouteLLM result, applied per dispatch. b · optimal stopping Confidence, then stop Hydra polls heads until the sequential test (SPRT) crosses your target confidence — then it stops early and banks the unspent heads.

accept ✔ stopped early Fewer heads, cleared bar — the calibrated number the field lacks. c · percolation-κ Blast radius (Molloy–Reed) 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 .

tier cost ramp active route fallback fired local terminal floor By the numbers every number has a mechanism Loud numbers. Real levers. No tokens-processed arms race. Each of these is something you can reproduce on your own machine with hyctl stats and 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.

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.