Fail-Open LLM Architecture: Why Your Reviewer Stage Should Never Block a Decision

The problem You added a reviewer LLM to your pipeline for good reasons. Quality matters, and a second pass catches self-contradictions the primary model misses. But the moment you wire a second model into production, you have a new failure surface: what happens when the reviewer itself is slow, errored, or unreachable? The instinct is to treat the reviewer as a gate — no pass from the reviewer, no decision released. That instinct is wrong. The pattern: fail-open When the reviewer...