Bergheim: Fast Judgment Calls for Code
write-up
· for bergheim
in #systemcrafters
· 2026-09-21 13:04 UTC
bergheim: think of it as a really fast yes/no-or-pick-a-bucket brain that plugs into code. Not for writing or chatting, just for the tiny judgment calls you'd otherwise either hand-code badly or waste a full LLM call on. Like:
- Triage — "is this support ticket urgent?" → 0.92 yes, so auto-escalate it instead of a human reading every one
- Moderation — "does this user post get allowed?" → no, 0.08, gate it before it publishes
- Routing — grade how complex a request is and send the easy ones to a cheap model, the hard ones to the big one
- Guardrail — "is this shell command / file edit risky?" → allow, confirm, or block before an agent runs it
The whole point: messy text in, a typed number out your code can branch on directly, in 70–500ms. It's the fuzzy if statement that used to need either brittle regexes or an overkill LLM call.