The kitchen panel: why every user sees the router.

Press Cmd+K on any LADLE reply and a panel slides in from the right. It shows: which model produced the reply, why the router chose that model, how many input and output tokens the turn consumed, whether search or extended thinking fired, and a rough per-turn cost estimate.

Every LADLE user has access to this. It's not a power-user setting or a paid tier. It's a keyboard shortcut on every reply.

**Why we built it.**

The AI industry has a transparency problem. When you ask ChatGPT a question, you don't know which model actually answered — GPT-4, 4o, 4o-mini, the routing rules aren't published. When Claude.ai routes for you, same story. The user is opting into a system that decides on their behalf, without seeing the decision.

That's fine for most users most of the time — the routing is generally reasonable and the reply arrives. But it becomes annoying when the reply feels off ("did I get the small model?"), when the bill seems high ("what did I use these tokens on?"), or when you're trying to understand the product you're paying for ("what does 'premium' actually mean here?").

The kitchen panel is our answer. It shows the routing decision, the token counts, and the reasoning. If you got a Haiku reply on a hard question and the reply was disappointing, the panel says "routed to Haiku because the prompt looked short and factual." If you're wondering why extended thinking added 12 seconds of latency, the panel says "thinking budget 8,000 tokens, actual thinking output ~5,200 tokens."

**What you can learn from it.**

Some patterns users have discovered by watching the kitchen panel:

Rewriting a short prompt as a longer, more detailed one often shifts the router from Haiku to Sonnet. The router uses prompt length and complexity as one signal. If your quick question kept getting a shallow reply, the kitchen panel tells you why.

Search-on turns cost more, and the panel shows how much. If your budget is tight this month and you notice most of your turns show 1-3 searches, you can turn search off deliberately for turns that don't need it.

Extended thinking rarely fires on drafting tasks, even when you leave it on — the model chooses whether to actually use the budget. The kitchen shows how many thinking tokens got spent, which is often zero even with thinking enabled.

**Why not hide it behind a "developer mode" flag.**

Because it isn't a developer feature. It's information the user paid for. Hiding it behind a toggle would communicate "this is complicated and probably confusing" — which we don't think is true. The panel uses plain English. Model names are model names. Tokens are labeled. The reasoning is one sentence per decision.

The one thing the kitchen panel isn't: a way to override the router. If you want a specific model, use the model chip on the composer (Fast forces Haiku, Deep forces Sonnet). The panel is for seeing what happened, not for controlling it — for that we have explicit controls, one click away.

Software should let you look under the hood. LADLE just makes the hood open by default.