Wake-Filter Pattern: Cheap Classifier Before Expensive Agent

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An agent fleet wired to a high-volume trigger source — channel mentions, queue events, webhooks — pays full cost on every cycle, even when the trigger is noise. A classifier placed in front of the main agent decides which triggers deserve a real cycle and which to drop. The pattern is old; what is new is that local LLMs make the classifier cost effectively zero, which flips the arithmetic in the pattern’s favor for cases that previously didn’t justify the latency.

Classifier on Agent Zone

Wake-Filter Pattern: Cheap Classifier Before Expensive Agent