AI gateway vs workflow router: what is the difference?
An AI gateway and a workflow router both sit between a request and a model, so they are easy to confuse. A gateway is infrastructure: it routes API calls by cost, availability, and rate limits. A workflow router is operational: it decides the whole path a coding task takes, of which the model is the last choice. They solve different problems and you can need both.
A gateway routes traffic
An AI gateway is a proxy in front of one or more model providers. It handles failover, load balancing, rate limit handling, cost-based provider selection, caching, and key management. Its unit of work is the API call. It answers "which endpoint should this request hit, at what price, right now." It does not know or care what the task is.
A workflow router routes tasks
A workflow router operates one level up. Its unit of work is the task, and it decides the whole path: what context to assemble, which tools to expose, what policy and approval path applies, what proof is required, and only then which model weight fits. Model selection is the last decision, downstream of scope and risk, not the first.
Why coding teams need the workflow layer
A gateway makes API traffic cheaper and more reliable, which is valuable, but it cannot keep a task in scope, cannot decide that a trivial edit deserves a light model, and cannot require proof before a change lands. Those are task-level decisions. Without the workflow layer, you get efficient delivery of unbounded, under-validated work.
A gateway optimizes the call. A workflow router optimizes the work. One is infrastructure, the other is operational, and the coding cost problem lives mostly in the second.
How Avorelo helps
Avorelo is a workflow layer, not a gateway. It decides the task path: it assembles and validates context, declares scope, scopes tool access to the task, sets the proof requirement, and routes to the appropriate model weight based on scope and prior receipts. It runs alongside whatever provider or gateway you already use, governing the work rather than the wire.