# Decision model application of the day

> Source: <https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/>
> Published: 2026-11-14 11:40:00+00:00

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.

I 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.

So, I am a trivia fan who:

So, 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:

The 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)

Consider 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.

I 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.

The 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)

Opus 5.5.[↩](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fnref-2)

...if I were not also the human running Zippyflash.[↩](https://www.natemeyvis.com/decision-model-application-of-the-day/#fnref-3)