Costs jumped after a prompt change that only added a little more context. What would you check first?

Instruction: Explain how you would investigate a prompt-related cost regression.

Context: Tests how the candidate diagnoses the problem, chooses the safest next step, and reasons through recovery. Explain how you would investigate a prompt-related cost regression.

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I would check whether the added context changed prompt length only slightly on average but pushed enough requests across a threshold where output length, routing behavior, or retrieval size expanded much more than expected. Small context changes can create nonlinear cost effects.

I would...

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