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[ARTICLE · art-45127] src=ampcode.com ↗ pub= topic=ai-products verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

A Faster Librarian

Ampcode's Librarian AI agent is now approximately three times faster and 43% cheaper after switching to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 model with websocket mode, reducing average search latency from 237 seconds to 81 seconds and cost from $1.21 to $0.69 while maintaining quality.

read1 min views7 publishedJun 18, 2026

The Librarian is now ~3x faster and 43% cheaper, with the same quality.

It now runs on GPT-5.5 (no reasoning) with websocket mode and an updated system prompt that encourages more parallel exploration. The Librarian fires ~8 tool calls in parallel per turn, up from ~3 with Sonnet, and wraps up a search in ~5 turns instead of ~15.

In our internal eval, about a quarter of that speedup comes from OpenAI's websocket mode and the rest from switching to GPT-5.5 with no reasoning:

| Sonnet-4.6 (medium) | GPT-5.5 (none) | |
|---|---|---|
| Latency (mean) | 237s | 81s (2.9x faster) |

| ↳ gain from websocket | — | ~1.3x | | ↳ gain from model | — | ~2.2x | | Quality (F1, mean) | 0.47 | 0.48 | | Average cost | $1.21 | $0.69 |

Here's a comparison:

How does Kubernetes' HorizontalPodAutoscaler handle missing pod metrics when scaling down — does it assume missing pods are at 100% of their resource requests, or 100% of the target utilization? Cite the function and logic in the source.

Sonnet 4.6 (left) took 2 minutes and cost $1.08, while GPT-5.5 (right) took 40 seconds and cost just $0.47.

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