Choosing & switching

Pick by how the presence is used, not by benchmarks — and switch whenever that changes.

There is no wrong route, only a mismatched one. Choose by the shape of the relationship you want, then re-route the moment that shape changes. The default, claude-sonnet-4-6, is the right answer until you have a concrete reason it isn't.

By use-case

If the presence mostly…	Route	Why
keeps you company	gemini-3-flash	Latency is the felt quality of a companion. Near-instant beats marginally deeper.
is a daily assistant	claude-sonnet-4-6	The balanced default — warm, quick, capable across everything most people ask.
runs on-chain automations	claude-opus-4-7	Multi-step value decisions reward the deepest reasoning; latency is irrelevant unattended.
leans on long memory	gemini-3-pro	Strong wide-context recall when the relationship has years of salient memory behind it.
needs a tunable trade	gpt-5.5	One model, an `effort` dial — see Effort.

Mixed needs

A presence is rarely just one of those. The pattern is a calm default plus an escalation rule, so the heavy work pulls a deeper route only when it runs:

preferences · route rule

{
  "route": {
    "default": "claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "automations": "claude-opus-4-7"
  }
}

Conversation stays fast; a 3am rebalance thinks hard. See Preferences for the full rule set.

What switching guarantees

Re-routing is a metadata change, not a migration. When you switch:

Memory is untouched — same pins, same keywords, same fade timers.
In-flight turns finish on the old route — the new model picks up from the next message.
Running intents continue — a scheduled job mid-execution completes on whatever it started with.
No re-warm cost— there is no per-route memory to rebuild; memory was never the model's.

The presence may phrase things a little differently after a switch — that is the model's voice, not lost memory. If tone matters to you, pin it in Preferences so it survives the route.

A note on cost

Deeper routes cost more per turn and, run unattended on a tight schedule, that compounds. Pair an opus standing intent with a sane interval and an early-exit check — read cheap, reason deep only when something actually moved.