I Called an LLM 16 Times — Cheaper and Better Than Once ($0.005/run)

TL;DR Asking an LLM to do everything in one shot degrades quality. Task decomposition + caching made it both cheaper and better. I split a 57-minute meeting transcript into 16 separate LLM calls using Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite. Total cost per run: $0.005 . The result was higher quality meeting notes than a single call to a more expensive model. Here's the design and the real numbers. 1. Why Meeting Notes Are a Hard Task for LLMs Meeting transcripts are messy by nature: Spoken language has no structu