Modality-Routed Governance
Route each input to the engine that perceives that input best, not to the cheapest API.
The industry treats AI vendors as interchangeable taps - one API, every model, route on price. DreamerOS routes on perception. Claude reads composition, narrative, and emotion. GPT reads optics, light physics, and materials. Gemini reads color, space, and balance. Perplexity grounds facts in citations. Grok pressure-tests creative risk. Routing by what each engine is best at perceiving is a different category from routing by which API returns a token cheapest.
The first lived instance ships in the Elite image quorum. Before any pixel generates, three engines co-author a single master brief (the Constellation Step 0). The synthesizer braids the surviving contributions into one directive that none of the three authored alone. The implementation lives in the gateway at constellation_brief.py and the per-call read of IMAGE_CONSTELLATION_ENABLED. Modality-Routed Governance is the broader doctrine that lives behind this one feature.
When the routing question changes from "which vendor is cheapest" to "which engine perceives this best", the unit you ship stops being a token and starts being a calibrated answer. Vendors compete on price. Routing competes on truth.