Cost Optimization

Intent Classification for Chatbots: Why Pure-Rule and Pure-LLM Both Fail (a 3-Tier Cascade)

Intent classification is the first node in any customer-service Agent — get it wrong and the next four architecture decisions are wasted. Pure-rule is brittle; pure-LLM blows the budget. The 3-tier fallback (rule → embedding → LLM) is the only engineering trade-off that stands up. Five minutes in you can spot the two fake architectures ('just use an LLM' / '100% rules'); ten minutes in you have starting thresholds for all three tiers; twenty minutes in you have the signals that say it's time to evolve from HybridClassifier to LLM Router.