gate-check

Find the gates

Theory: Cheap decisions and Gate practice. An agent does two kinds of work: it writes, which needs a big model, and it decides — is this spam, which queue, does this need a person — which is a bounded question the answer to which comes from a set you already know. A gate is a cheap decision layer that sorts the stream so the expensive model only sees the items that actually need judgement.

Workflow

1. Map the decisions. Read the pipeline's entry points and prompts and list every decision made before or during a model call: classification, routing, filtering, yes/no triage, priority, language, "is this even for us". Ignore the writing — only bounded decisions with a known label set.
2. Count what each costs today. For each decision currently made by the big model: calls per day if known, tokens per call, and what a wrong answer costs. A decision worth one bit that burns a frontier call is the headline finding.
3. Propose the cheapest gate that can hold it, in rising order of cost:
   • a rule — regex, allowlist, header check: free, instant, blind to anything unanticipated; always the first layer, never the last
   • a classic classifier — logistic regression or similar over simple features, trained on a few hundred labelled examples: milliseconds, fractions of a cent, and the baseline every fancier option must beat
   • a small / System One model — when the input is too varied for features but the output is still a label with a confidence score
4. Route fail-closed. Every gate needs a confidence threshold, and doubt goes down the safe path: unsure means escalate to the big model (or a person), never means guess. Say explicitly what each gate's unsure route is.
5. Offer the baseline scaffold. If the user wants to proceed, generate the module's thirty-minute exercise for their data: a label.py that samples ~200 real examples for hand-labelling, and a baseline.py that trains the classic classifier and prints accuracy against a held-out split. Every vendor claim and small-model option must beat this number on their data before it earns a place in the pipeline.

Output format

Gate check — <pipeline>
decisions found: <n>, currently on the big model: <n>

1. <decision> — <where in the code>
   today: <who decides, est. cost>   label set: <the labels>
   gate: <rule | classifier | small model> — <why this tier>
   unsure -> <escalation path>
   saves: <est. calls/tokens diverted>
...

Rank by savings. If a decision genuinely needs the big model — open-ended, no stable label set, wrong answers are cheap to fix — say so and leave it alone; a gate that guesses is worse than no gate.