Cheaper LLM labelling

I have a small project where I needed to label commits as either “maintenance” or “new development”. The obvious way to do it is with a cheap but relatively capable LLM, like GPT 5.6 Luna. I tested it on a small set of commits and manually verified its labelling, and it emitted the same label as I would have for the entire test set. That was good enough for me to roll out on a wider scale. If we have Simon Willison’s llm CLI tool installed (and you should – it’s great!), we can call it in a pipe from Perl, and read its response. My script had a loop that retried the request a few times, but without that bookkeeping, the code for this is simple enough. In[1]: sub classify { my ($msg) = @_; my $pid = open2( my $output, my $prompt, 'llm -m openrouter/openai/gpt-5.6-luna' ); print $prompt prompt_template($msg); close $prompt; # Slurp the entire response and chomp off the # trailing newline. chomp(my $result = do { local $/; <$output> }); waitpid($pid, 0); return $result; } (Continue…

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