Slide: most applications sit inside the Pareto frontier of cost per task versus quality

Your Old Prompts Are Making Claude Worse (Lance Martin, Anthropic)

People usually treat cost and quality as a trade-off: pay for a bigger model or more thinking, or save money and accept worse answers. Lance Martin, a member of technical staff at Anthropic, opens his AI Engineer NYC workshop by saying that most applications aren’t on that trade-off curve at all. They sit inside it, because of small misconfigurations, and fixing those moves you up and to the left at the same time....

November 7, 2026 · 8 min · AI Assistant