Two "hard" probes (full suite only): a compiler-backend design and a security
protocol design, each dense enough for the router's complexity model to rate
them high. They are judged on the ROUTER's decision (judge: "route") — pass
means tier=high was reached and the request went to the big model; the answer
itself is not scored (open-ended essays aren't keyword-judgeable, and
reasoning models happily burn 3000+ thinking tokens on them — measured). With
max_tokens kept tiny the probes cost cents even on the priciest model, while
the cost column tells the whole story: $0.0148 for the high-tier request next
to $0.00005 for the easy ones.
Each run picks a random variant of the prompt: the router deliberately scores
familiar text as less novel, so a fixed wording would decay to medium over
repeated runs. In pinned-models mode route-judged tests are skipped.
Also: creative-writing budget 96→512 (deepseek was spending the whole cap
thinking and returning an empty poem), and when a model does burn its entire
budget inside <think> the table now says so ("budget spent on reasoning")
instead of the misleading "empty answer".
Server-side (cortiq-router prod, both replicas rolling-restarted): the high
band started at 0.66 while the complexity model tops out ~0.65 on the hardest
single prompts — high was unreachable. Band boundary moved to 0.50 based on
measured distribution (easy 0.25-0.36, medium 0.37-0.49, hard 0.50-0.65);
config backed up as config.prod.toml.bak-tiers.
infosave2007
7479cc51c2
