We Upgraded to a Frontier Model and Our Costs Went Down
Summary
Mendral describes upgrading to frontier models and employing a triage-based agent hierarchy to dramatically reduce LLM costs in CI failure investigations. A cheap Haiku triager filters most issues using exact and semantic error matching, while an Opus orchestrator escalates only when necessary, all accessed via a ClickHouse SQL interface with materialized views. The approach generalizes to other high-volume event data, including security logs and IoT telemetry.