A team cut their AI inference bill by more than half. Three months later, customer satisfaction was dropping and the cost savings were tied to the quality loss.
Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost—and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circuit breaking, achieving an 85% reduction in LLM costs without sacrificing answer quality.
Using mathematical optimization to solve a pickup-and-delivery problem with time windows. The post “Los Movimientos”: The Routing Problem That Nearly Broke My Spirit appeared first on Towards Data Science .
An AI agent passed every metric in the eval harness I published, then the CFO killed it — its successful resolutions cost more than the humans it replaced. The one metric that predicts whether an agent survives production, and how to measure it without a rebuild.
You "vibe coded" the import. Understand Adam's optimization dynamics, why it fails spectacularly, and how to fix it.
The article titled "Your AI Bill Is a Toll Booth. Stop Paying Twice." discusses how users are unexpectedly paying more for AI services than anticipated, likening the experience to a toll booth where one pays twice. It highlights the unseen costs that can arise when using AI tools and urges readers to be vigilant about their expenses. The piece was first published on Towards Data Science.
arXiv:2607. 25068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Routing decisions between a cheap heuristic and an expensive large language model (LLM) are typically framed as a difficulty problem: send the hard cases to the expensive path.
How to decide when an AI agent should act on its own by using cost asymmetry instead of a fixed confidence cutoff The post The Threshold Is a Price, Not a Percentage appeared first on Towards Data Science .
For nearly a decade, this part of neural networks barely changed. DeepSeek is trying to reinvent it.
One near miss, four months of running agents, and the question almost nobody is asking: what are you supposed to do while the AI writes the code? The post AI Made Me 5x Faster. It Also Made Me 5x Wors...
arXiv:2606. 17519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales?
What actually makes a Forward Deployed Engineer, told through one supply chain project. The post The AI Was the Easy Part: What Is a Forward-Deployed Engineer in a Supply Chain?
RouteRepair is a method that diagnoses specific weaknesses in large language model (LLM)-generated routing heuristics by evaluating performance at the instance level and then applies targeted modifications to the heuristic components that are failing, while preserving components that already perform well. It combines routing evidence, solver behavior, and program context to set bounded repair objectives and validates each change through matched parent-child evaluation of failure recovery and collateral degradation. Experiments on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) show significant reductions in optimality gaps and route costs, demonstrating that failure-aware, evidence-constrained refinement can improve routing heuristics on difficult instances while maintaining performance on easier cases.