7. Local Model Self-Escalation via Function Call

Date: 2026-05-05

Status

Accepted

Context

Rules-based routing cannot cover all cases where a task exceeds the local model's capability. The system needs a mechanism for the local model to signal that it cannot handle a prompt and escalation is needed.

Decision

The local model can trigger escalation by returning a function call escalate(reason: string) rather than a text response. This is exposed to the model as a standard OpenAI function schema alongside the other tools (bash, grep, read_file). The tool was originally named escalate_to_claude; it was renamed to escalate in ADR-0030 to reflect that the escalation target is not necessarily Claude.

Consequences

The mechanism is unambiguous — no parsing of hedging language or quality assessment of the output is needed. It requires the local model to reliably support function calling. Qwen2.5-Coder does. If a different local model is configured without function calling support, self-escalation falls back silently to text output and the rules layer is the only escalation trigger.