This 2-Step LLM Gate Pattern Makes RAG Systems Faster and Cheaper

This article argues that most Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines waste latency and compute by blindly triggering semantic search for every query, regardless of intent. It introduces a lightweight “2-Step Gate Pattern” in which a small routing agent first determines whether retrieval is necessary before touching the vector store, improving architectural clarity, reducing cost, and creating cleaner observability for production-scale AI systems.