October 8, 2026 · America/Los_Angeles
Model bake-off: a separate decision
I also compared answer models after the routing experiment. This was a separate 12-question study, with 72 answer trials, rather than another routing-off/on result. It informed the local Terra configuration alongside product judgment; it did not establish a universal model winner.
Four existing page, role and next-read questions plus eight broader creative, enterprise AI, director-fit, healthcare, scientific-research, comparison, ownership and architecture questions. Luna and Terra each ran twice per question in alternating order; GPT-5 and Sol each had one exploratory repeat. All used Luna Decisions routing, low reasoning effort, hybrid retrieval disabled and a fixed source-aware gpt-5-mini judge blinded to answer-model identity.
Terra and Luna produced similarly supported answers on this small set. Terra was the faster answer-model candidate; Sol showed no clear quality gain here and took longer. The table retains the original ownership failures before the final guardrail repair. Eight separate ownership follow-ups passed across all four models after that repair; they do not replace failed main trials.
Latency covers the generation workflow, including routing and career retrieval, and excludes judging. Eight of 60 routing-eligible trials hit the 1.5-second router timeout and used the page-grounded fallback. Among 18 paired Terra/Luna trials without either router timing out, medians were 4.55 s and 5.09 s; the median paired difference was 0.69 s. These are local workflow observations, not a general API latency guarantee.
No reconciled dollar-cost comparison was recorded. Saved answer-call usage for Terra's 24 trials was 378,696 input and 9,744 output tokens; Luna's 24 used 404,482 input and 10,396 output tokens. Cache hits and call counts differed. These totals exclude judge/router token costs and do not establish lower bills or savings.
All 72 answers were regraded after the judge received complete captured sources; four unchanged answers then needed recommendation-bucket grading corrections. Original grades and rechecks remain in the local artifacts. Answer-generation file fingerprints stayed stable during the paired Terra/Luna study; the judge file changed during source-packet repair. Unequal repeats, small authored datasets, live career retrieval and later code changes limit generalization and comparison with the earlier routing study.
The comparison informed the local Terra configuration. Daniel separately confirmed gpt-5.6-terra as the intended answer model on October 17. Current release validation and production configuration verification remain separate gates; no new paid model bake-off is included here.
Source: the saved October 8 model-comparison report, aggregate results, original grades and follow-up records. Complete file references and fingerprints are retained in the repository review notes.