{"slug": "decision-model-application-of-the-day", "title": "Decision model application of the day", "summary": "A blogger used Anthropic's Claude (identified in the post as Opus 5.5) to build a quiz game that calls a decision-model API to grade typed answers, and reports the model was \"nearly perfect\" at sorting responses into correct, incorrect and other cases without prompt tuning. Claude produced a usable version in about 5 minutes, and the author argues LLM-friendly APIs let agents assemble features that would be impractical to build into services themselves. The post recommends keeping a decision-model API key in an .env file the LLM can access, noting secret management can consume most of the human time on a small project.", "body_md": "I've [been thinking about](https://www.natemeyvis.com/blog/?q=API%20design) API design in the AI era and about dividing responsibilities between a service and an AI agent calling into that service.\n\nI have no firm conclusions here yet, but am still here to report that LLM-friendly APIs enable all sorts of useful things that would be impractical to build into the services themselves.\n\nSo, I am a trivia fan who:\n\nSo, I had Claude sort my overdue questions into categories and spin up a quiz for me in the style of a beloved quiz show. It has me type in the answers and calls into a [decision model](https://www.natemeyvis.com/blog/?q=decision%20models) to tell me if I'm right or wrong. I can override the model's judgments, but there's rarely a reason to. Even without tuning the prompt, the decision model has been nearly perfect in sorting my responses into correct, incorrect, and other cases.<sup>[1](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fn-1)</sup> Here, for example, is Jev recognizing an unlisted, not-completely-obvious alternate answer:\n\nThe point isn't that this is possible; it's that it's *easy*. I did it on a whim. Claude<sup>[2](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fn-2)</sup> one-shotted a usable version in about 5 minutes, and the few modifications I wanted were similarly easy. Just making this for myself took less effort and time than I would have spent writing a hypothetical feature request to a human.[3](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fn-3)\n\nConsider keeping a decision model API key available in an .env file your LLM knows about, if you're into this sort of thing; managing secrets can be the majority of the human time of a small project these days.\n\nI expect to modify and permute this in any number of ways; I love drilling flashcards more than almost anyone, but even I find myself wanting a bit more variety. As LLMs get better, plugging into an API and asking for something new gets safer, faster, and easier. I expect more of my software usage to follow this pattern.\n\nThe other cases are \"prompt me\" (e.g., if I write \"goose\" when asked for [the state bird of Hawai'i](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nene_(bird)>), \"throw this question out\" (if the model detects that the question is somehow ill-formed), and \"did not attempt\" (which still counts as wrong on the Zippyflash back-end but does not deduct points in the game).[↩](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fnref-1)\n\nOpus 5.5.[↩](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fnref-2)\n\n...if I were not also the human running Zippyflash.[↩](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fnref-3)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/decision-model-application-of-the-day", "canonical_source": "https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/", "published_at": "2026-11-14 11:40:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-14 11:52:20.673315+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Claude", "Anthropic", "Opus 5.5", "Zippyflash", "Nate Meyvis"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/decision-model-application-of-the-day", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/decision-model-application-of-the-day.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/decision-model-application-of-the-day.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/decision-model-application-of-the-day.jsonld"}}