Local-First LLM Routing: A Decision Table for Latency, Secrets, and Offline Mode

A field-service team learns the hard way A field-service team built a support chatbot that sent every message to a cloud LLM endpoint. The design held until a technician drove through a tunnel, and the request queue grew into an eleven-minute backlog. The same week, a support ticket containing a customer's account number appeared in a third-party log because the payload was never classified. The…