GraceML Platform Lead · 32 · SeoulSimulated persona · Six weeks from product launch
Our support assistant uses one frontier model and answers 96% of test cases, but its rare outages are expensive. With six weeks until launch, should we build a multi-model router now or ship one primary model with simpler fallbacks?
Reasoning pattern: production design choice under launch pressure
Relay Answer
Ship a primary model with deliberately simple, tested failure paths unless your evaluation shows a second model catches important errors the first model does not. Add timeouts, bounded retries, cached safe responses, retrieval-only fallback for supported cases, explicit abstention, and a manual escalation path. A router adds policy, prompt, evaluation, observability, and incident complexity that six weeks may not absorb. Design the interface so a second provider can be added later, and run it in shadow on a small eval set before routing live traffic.
A resilience view wants provider redundancy before launch; a simplicity view says an untested router can create more silent quality and operational failures than it prevents.
Failover can change data residency, retention, safety behavior, and answer style. Reliability is not just uptime if the fallback violates a customer or compliance promise.
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