I. The Expensive if/else Statement
LLMs are remarkably good at handling the unknown. Give them an edge case you've never anticipated, and they'll reason through it correctly. That's genuine value.
The problem is that most of your traffic isn't unknown. A payment that failed on the third retry, a VIP customer with a disputed charge, an order flagged at 0.9 risk score — you already know what to do with these. But if your architecture routes everything through the LLM, it pays full inference cost regardless:
from pydantic_ai import Agent
from enum import Enum






