> **Model-offloading & the price of lost confidence — Silou**
> Canonical: https://silou.dev/writing-model-offloading
> Generated: 2026-07-19 — markdown twin of the HTML page (the HTML is the source of truth).

# Model-offloading & the price of lost confidence

*Writing · draft*

When a smaller or local model wins — and when the harness to trust it costs more than the model you saved.

> **Draft in progress.** The full piece is being written here. The seed below is the through-line; I'll expand it into the finished essay.

Sending non-interactive work to a cheaper model can be a real win — until the verification and guardrails you need to trust its output cost more than the model you saved. The tradeoff is reliability, not just price; the harness is what makes the call legible.

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