The customer's LLM bill is unsustainable. Cut costs 10x without destroying quality. Walk me through it.
10x doesn't come from one trick. It's multiplicative: routing x caching x prompt diet x batching x distillation. The stacked-levers playbook with rough multipliers, and the eval gate that keeps quality honest.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
10x doesn't come from one trick. It's multiplicative: routing x caching x prompt diet x batching x distillation. The stacked-levers playbook with rough multipliers, and the eval gate that keeps quality honest.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
