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Cerebrum’s agents aren’t a flat pool. They’re organized in four levels, each with a defined role.

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L1 — Team Lead

Free-model orchestration. Reads the request, classifies it, and decides whether it’s routine (stays inside free) or non-trivial (escalates to L2). Delegates work, doesn’t execute it.

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L2 — Managerial roles

Paid-model leadership. Specializes by role:
  • Architect — system design and structural decisions.
  • Tech Lead — implementation plans and code-level direction.
  • Release Manager — deployment and rollout decisions.
  • QA, Security, and Adversarial leads — quality, risk, and red-team thinking.
L2 doesn’t execute either. It plans and routes work to L4.

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L3 — Acceptance

Free-model verification. Reads the executor’s output and checks it against the original ask. Returns pass/fail with deltas (what’s missing, what needs revision). It doesn’t rewrite.

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L4 — Executor

Paid-model production. Specializes in file writes — emits net-new files and surgical edits — and streams tokens with periodic heartbeats so long generations stay alive end-to-end.

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How escalation works

Within a level, conflicts retry up to three times. After three failures, the conflict moves up — to a more capable agent — rather than burning more attempts at the same level. Sub-job nesting is capped at depth two.

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Why this shape

  • Free models do orchestration cheaply. L1 (classify) and L3 (verify) don’t need a paid model, and using one would waste cost.
  • Paid models do actual work. L2 plans, L4 builds. The hardest tokens land on the best model.
  • Acceptance is separated from execution. The same agent doesn’t get to grade its own work.

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Beyond code

The L1/L2/L3/L4 shape suits code flows. Non-code flows aren’t shaped the same way:
  • document_writing is an editorial chain (outline → research → draft → fact_check → polish).
  • research_brief is a fan_out across specialist subdomains (web, internal KB, academic) joined by a synthesis level.
  • security_review is a triage + parallel static scans + LLM analyst + human approval + final report pipeline.
  • quick_qa is a single free-tier level with a schema verifier.
These all run on the same scenario engine. The L1/L2/L3/L4 layering remains the default convention for code_build and code_build_strict; everything else picks its own level ids.