
RouteZero is a local-first AI routing agent built for the AMD Developer Hackathon Track 1: General-Purpose AI Agent. It handles factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, sentiment classification, text summarization, named entity recognition, code debugging, logical reasoning, and code generation while minimizing external model-token usage. The project is designed around the hackathon’s scoring model: clear the accuracy gate first, then reduce total Fireworks tokens. Rather than sending every task to a large remote model, RouteZero uses a layered decision process. It first applies narrowly constrained deterministic solvers for safe tasks such as clean arithmetic expressions and unambiguous sentiment. It then uses a bundled Qwen2.5 1.5B local model through llama.cpp for constrained summaries, accepting results only after format, content-overlap, and entity-preservation validation. Tasks that cannot be safely completed locally are classified by category and assigned a local difficulty score. RouteZero then selects a model only from the ALLOWED_MODELS list injected by the evaluation harness. Easy tasks prioritize token efficiency, while difficult code and reasoning tasks select the strongest inferred allowed capability tier. Every Fireworks request uses the supplied FIREWORKS_BASE_URL, and the agent rejects any model outside the allowlist. The system includes English-only response instructions, bounded retries for transient failures, truncation detection, and a strict 29-second per-task deadline. It writes schema-compliant results atomically to /output/results.json, so individual task failures cannot corrupt the full submission. RouteZero is packaged as a public linux/amd64 Docker image for the 4 GB RAM and 2-vCPU judging environment. In final rehearsal, it completed all eight practice categories correctly in about 20 seconds, using local inference where appropriate and reducing unnecessary external API usage.
13 Jul 2026