Cost

Your ticket queue already contains the FAQ you haven’t written. To get it out, group the questions before comparing them against what you have — and count not just how many customers asked, but how long they kept asking. The backlog was written by the people who will read it. Someone answers the same question for the fourth time in two weeks, notices, and writes an FAQ article if the week is quiet. That is how most knowledge bases grow. It works, and it has a predictable blind spot: it finds the questions that annoy whoever is on shift, and misses the ones spread thinly enough that nobody noticed — which are exactly the ones a written article serves best. ...

A cheap classifier should pay for the expensive investigator. Three stages — deterministic pre-filter, lightweight classify, full triage — let the cost shape match the value shape on a queue of mixed-value events. Spend tokens where the work is. The easy way to build an agent on a queue is one prompt that does everything: receive an event, decide if it matters, pull the data, write the response. One prompt, one model call, simple to ship. ...

The same triage agent running on your laptop and running server-side off an alert webhook looks like the same agent — but how much agency you give the LLM should be completely different on each side. Locally, you should let the LLM stretch out: hand it the MCPs you’ve set up for investigation, let it pick which tool to call, let it choose its own path, let it backtrack and try a different hypothesis. Discovery is a feature. You’re standing right there — every step shows up on your screen, and you can redirect at any time. ...