The Hidden Watchdog: Cutting LLM Judge Costs With a 40-Line Pre-Gate

LLM judges, meant to ensure quality control, are quietly consuming a third of your AI budget—but most teams don't measure it. This post reveals a counterintuitive solution: a 40-line offline pre-filter using simple heuristics can handle 68% of cases cheaply, cutting expensive judge calls by two-thirds. As token costs become the industry's new pain point, this tiered approach demonstrates that rigorous AI evaluation doesn't require breaking your budget.