Lean Inference: Lean Manufacturing Principles Applied to AI (neurometric.substack.com) AI

The article argues that AI agent inference should follow “lean” manufacturing/Toyota Production System principles to reduce waste such as overusing frontier models, bloating RAG context, making sequential blocking tool calls, and relying on unstructured outputs that trigger costly retry loops. It proposes practices like just-in-time, step-scoped context; re-ranking and aggressive retrieval truncation; deterministic guardrails and structured output enforcement; explicit latency (“takt time”) budgets with DAG decomposition and parallelism; and prompt/tool caching to cut repeated token costs.