Episode Details

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/benchmarking-cheap-llms-for-production-agent-traces.
One LLM call runs on every agent trace we ingest. We found a model 30× cheaper that holds quality, verified against real search traffic.
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Every agent trace we ingest gets reduced to a short, searchable digest by one LLM call, and because it runs on every trace it's our most frequent call. We tested four cheaper models against Sonnet 4.6 on a frozen set of 50 traces, grading not just the summaries but whether semantic search still returned the same traces. gpt-4o-mini held all but one rule at about a thirtieth of Sonnet's cost, so that's what we shipped. The two cheapest-looking models, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite and Kimi K2.5, both failed.