---
title: "ROUTE | The Model Portfolio"
description: "ROUTE is a five-skill discipline for governing a mix of language models: Register, Objective typing, Utilize policy, Track, Evolve. Register catalogs every model with mandate, cost class, privacy class, and retirement status. Objective typing names what a task actually requires before a model is chosen. Utilize policy writes the routing rules, cascades, and fallbacks. Track measures cost, latency, and quality per route. Evolve promotes, demotes, and retires on a cadence. A leaderboard pick is a collection. ROUTE is a portfolio."
image: "https://lenvanderhof.com/photos/len-portrait-1.jpg"
---

Framework

# ROUTE The Model Portfolio

ROUTE is a five-skill discipline for governing a mix of language models: Register, Objective typing, Utilize policy, Track, Evolve. Register catalogs every model with mandate, cost class, privacy class, and retirement status. Objective typing names what a task actually requires before a model is chosen. Utilize policy writes the routing rules, cascades, and fallbacks. Track measures cost, latency, and quality per route. Evolve promotes, demotes, and retires on a cadence. A leaderboard pick is a collection. ROUTE is a portfolio.

The moves

5

## When to use it

Use it when every task hits the flagship model and the bill arrives later. If the team cannot name which model owns which job, you do not have a routing policy. You have a default.

## The moves

1. 01

### Register

Catalog every model with mandate, cost class, privacy class, and retirement status so nothing runs unowned.
2. 02

### Objective typing

Name what the task requires (reasoning depth, format, latency, quality, privacy) before a model is chosen.
3. 03

### Utilize policy

Write the routing rules, cascades, and fallbacks that decide which model handles which request.
4. 04

### Track

Measure cost, latency, and quality per route so a waste pattern surfaces before the invoice.
5. 05

### Evolve

Promote, demote, and retire on a cadence so a deprecation is a scheduled release, not a scramble.

## The book

Available now

### The Model Portfolio

How to Route, Mix, and Govern LLMs Like a Strategic Asset Allocator

Open the bookThe series

## Related frameworks

GRAIN

### The RAG Engineer

GRAIN is a retrieval loop: Gather, Rank, Assemble, Inspect, Navigate. Gather collects candidate passages. Rank orders them for the question actually asked. Assemble builds the context the model may see. Inspect checks that the cited chunk is the one used. Navigate decides the next lookup or the refusal. If you cannot point at the passage, you do not have retrieval. You have a fluent guess.

STACK

### The Agentic Codebase

STACK is a five-layer architecture for repositories where humans and agents share work: Structure, Toolchain, Agent configuration, Connection, Knowledge and quality. The agent OS is versioned like the app.

SENSE

### AI Agents for Startup Strategy

SENSE is a five-move strategic intelligence layer: Scan, Evaluate, Navigate, Simulate, Execute. It turns agent work from a productivity shortcut into a sourced claim that changes a watchlist, an assumption register, or a Monday decision.

## Essays on this site

LLM integration is an operating-design problem

## Terminology

- [ROUTE](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/route/)
- [GRAIN](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/grain/)
- [STACK](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/stack/)
- [SENSE](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/sense/)
- [AI agent](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/ai-agent/)
- [Human in the loop](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/human-in-the-loop/)
- [Override doctrine](https://lenvanderhof.com/glossary/override-doctrine/)

Not a vendor AI-stack slide, not a capital-markets product, and not a PORTFOLIO acronym. ROUTE is the named system in The Model Portfolio, available now in English and Dutch paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.

## Citation

ROUTE (The Model Portfolio). Len P. van der Hof, Systems for the Strategic Self. https://lenvanderhof.com/frameworks/route/

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