Put a 0.25 second judge in front of your AI agents
Big models do the work. Around that work sit hundreds of small yes-or-no questions a day. A small judge model answered 116,097 of them in 20 days, in a median of 245 ms, and only acts alone above a confidence gate.
What changed this week
- Model routing: the judge picks the model per message. The same report went from 137 s to 45 s.
- Merge request reviewer: findings on code the MR never touched score 0.19 to 0.40, real ones 0.94. 16 of 26 false majors became follow-ups.
- QA: it reads the page and judges 57 acceptance criteria. 94 passed, 38 went to a human, none guessed.
- 17% of judge calls failed in 20 days and nothing broke, because the old rule decides whenever the judge is down or unsure.
How to do it
- List the small questions your agents answer with a full model run today: is this message asking me to stop, did this change cause this bug, which model should answer this. Each is a yes or no, a pick, or a score.
- Put a small judge model in front of them. It answers a typed question with a probability in about a quarter of a second, instead of 5 to 14 seconds for a big model.
- Set a confidence gate. Above 0.9 the judge acts alone. Below it, or when it is down, the old rule decides. Nothing new can break.
- Keep the dangerous words on the strong model. Merge, prod, deploy and release always go to the big model, after the judge once sent a merge-to-prod to the small one and missed that the work was already merged.
- Log every decision with its probability for 20 days, then read where it paid and where it was wrong before widening it.
Read my agent code and list every place a large model answers a yes/no, a pick-one, or a score question. For each: the question, how often it runs per day, and what a wrong answer would cost. Propose which of them a small judge model could answer with a probability, the confidence gate above which it may act alone, and the fallback rule below the gate. Keep merge, deploy, production and release decisions on the strong model, always.
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