Originally published on AIdeazz — cross-posted here with canonical link. Running production agents taught me something counterintuitive: using Claude or GPT-4 for everything is like hiring a surgeon to take blood pressure. After analyzing 50,000+ agent interactions across our Oracle-hosted systems, I found that smart multi-model LLM routing cuts costs by 82% while actually improving response times. The Economics of Intelligence Overkill Most developers default to the "best" model for everything. I did too, burning $3,400/month on Claude API calls for a Telegram customer service bot that mostly answered FAQs. The wake-up call came when I instrumented our agents and discovered that 76% of queries were simple pattern matching: order status checks, business hours, pricing questions.…