Cost-Effective Pipeline: Cheap Model Drafts + Frontier Model Final Pass
Visual-Basis3400 · reddit · 2026-07-23
The author shares a two-tier routing architecture to optimize cost and quality in high-volume document generation pipelines.
Workflow:
- Cheap Model for Drafting: Expands structured outlines into prose per section. This is the high-token, low-judgment part where a smaller model suffices.
- Frontier Model for Final Pass: Performs a single pass on the assembled draft to tighten the top line, catch cross-section contradictions, and run a faithfulness check. This is the low-token, high-judgment part.
Effects & Limitations:
This approach routes the majority of tokens to the cheap tier, substantially reducing costs while maintaining quality and improving latency via parallelization. However, limitations exist: subtle factual errors from the cheap model might bypass the final review; maintaining two prompt surfaces increases overhead; and the routing threshold is currently a hand-tuned guess rather than a learned decision.
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