Lesson 5 of 10 · Cut AI Product Costs Without Killing Quality
In this lesson. A harness so “cheaper” does not mean “worse” in production.
What you will learn
- Eval before and after
- Revert rules
- Keep an expensive path for hard cases
Walkthrough
You will rerun your eval set after each cut. If faithfulness or task success drops, you revert or you route those cases back to the expensive path. Cost work that skips eval is how products quietly rot. This is the quality gate.
Work through the ideas in order. After each point, pause and connect it to a task you already do — a document, a workflow, or a feature you own. The goal of Cut AI Product Costs Without Killing Quality is usable skill, not a pile of notes.
If something is unclear, rewrite it in your own words before you continue. Teaching the step back to yourself is the fastest way to see gaps.
Practice
Run (or tabletop) an eval on the cheap path versus the current path. Keep a row for each failure.
Keep the first attempt small. A finished example you can reuse beats a perfect plan you never run.
Check your understanding
- Can you explain the goal of this lesson in one sentence to a teammate?
- Where would you apply “Eval before and after” in your own work this week?
- What would you change on a second pass of the practice?
Next. Continue to the following lesson when the practice has a real artifact, even a rough one.