Cost per task: Using cheap classifiers to route across Gemini models and thinking levels
The article argues that cost per successful task, not price per token, governs production economics for coding agents, and reports a 50-question auto-graded benchmark routing tasks with TypeSafe's Jev classifier across Gemini configurations. A frozen regex and prompt-length heuristic scored 93.8% on 16 development questions but fell 23.2 points to 70.6% on 34 held-out tasks, while Jev agreed with hand labels on all 34 and 48 of 50 overall; capping maxOutputTokens at 300 saved nothing on easy tasks and broke 7 of 25 hard ones. A router sending tasks to Flash-Lite first and escalating Jev-flagged complex ones to Flash on low thinking solved all 50, as did Flash on low thinking alone, and the article notes caching favors keeping long context-heavy turns on one model.