OpenRouter as a Control Plane

Model lock-in is a quiet tax. You pick a provider, wire the SDK, tune the prompts, and six months later the best model for your job lives somewhere else.

OpenRouter turns that into a routing problem. Hermes talks to one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. You change the model slug when you add credit, when a free model gets crowded, or when a new Hermes-class checkpoint lands.

Start on free models to prove the workflow. Move to a stronger paid model when the agent is doing real production work. The website, the login, the voice layer, and the workspace stay the same.

That is the control plane we wanted: one studio, many brains, no rebuild.