routing

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.

Sending every request to the frontier model is the lazy bill. The patterns that route by difficulty, the verifier that enforces a hard quality floor, and the failure mode that turns a cost-saving cascade into a worse, slower system.

Looks like an algorithms question; it's actually an operations question wearing one. The candidates who fail reach for 'solve VRP'; the ones who pass design for the 2pm reality that invalidates every morning plan.