[storystarling]

The danger is that we bridge that gap with backend complexity. I spent weeks over-engineering a chain of evaluators and retries to get reliable outputs from cheaper models, thinking I was optimizing margins.

Then a smarter model dropped that handled the nuance zero-shot. That sophisticated orchestration layer immediately became technical debt—slower and harder to maintain than just swapping the API endpoint.

[barrenko]

Whatever we do now to "steer" the model to do the job, my 5 cents, it will all get sucked into the model itself; skate where the puck is going as they say, and relentlessly focus on user experience and the overall product, that's how you get something like Granola.