Your agent only needs a classifier for tool routing — 20x cheaper, 400ms

multiply_matrix · x · 2026-09-18

Amid the hype around small-model approaches, one developer pushes back on the "it's just a classifier" dismiss: parts of your agent pipeline may only need a classifier.

Spending LLM reasoning tokens just to decide which tool to call is wasteful — a small classifier does the same routing in 400ms at roughly 20x lower cost. The takeaway: tier your agent architecture by task difficulty.

Original post →

More from coding & agent

coding & agent channel →