Your LLM Judge Costs More Than the Agent. Gate It in 40 Lines.

Short summary

LLM evaluation layers can cost as much as the agents they monitor. A 40-line offline pre-gate triages spans with deterministic rules and escalates only uncertain cases to the expensive judge, reducing judge cost share from 50% to 16%. The approach is production-tested, deterministic, and provides a CI/CD gate with configurable cost thresholds.

• •Pre-gate filters obvious failures with four deterministic rules before expensive LLM judgment
• •Cuts judge cost share from 50% to 16% by catching schema errors, empty payloads, and duplicate retries cheaply
• •40-line offline script with configurable cost targets and CI/CD gate (exit codes 0/1/2)

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.