What the Pareto view shows
X-axis: cost per run. Y-axis: pass rate. Every simulation you’ve run is a dot. Baselines, published versions, drafts, Improvement candidates — all plotted. The Pareto frontier connects the dots that aren’t dominated by any other — for their cost, they’re the best quality, or for their quality, they’re the cheapest. Everything below the frontier is strictly worse than something on it.Making a decision
- Cheaper + higher quality — obviously ship.
- Cheaper + same quality — usually ship. Watch for edge case regressions.
- Same cost + higher quality — usually ship.
- More expensive + higher quality — the interesting case. Is the quality gain worth the cost gain? Depends on domain.
- More expensive + same or lower quality — don’t ship.
Cost vs. quality vs. latency
There’s a third axis you can toggle: latency. Some workflows are latency-critical (chat) and cheaper isn’t worth the extra 500ms. Others are batch (nightly) and latency doesn’t matter. Toggle: click Add axis on the chart. View as 3D scatter or as multiple 2D projections.Filtering the frontier
The full plot can be cluttered. Filter:- By target type — show only Draft variants, or only Improvement candidates, or only published versions.
- By dataset — show results against a specific dataset.
- By dimension — show performance on a specific tag (“hard cases only”).
Pareto by dataset tag
Because “quality” depends on which examples you test, the frontier changes per tag:- On
easyexamples, cheap models often match expensive ones — frontier is flat. - On
hardexamples, expensive models dominate — frontier is steep.
Historical Pareto
The historical view shows the frontier over time. Each week’s best point plotted. Watch:- Frontier moving up-and-left — you’re improving quality and reducing cost. Ideal.
- Frontier moving up-and-right — quality gains cost more. Common, sometimes acceptable.
- Frontier moving down-and-right — quality regressed while cost went up. Bad. Investigate.
Model selection
Simulations that vary the model (same Flow, different model choices) build a natural model comparison Pareto. Useful when picking a default model — you see the tradeoff explicitly.Auto-suggest improvements from Pareto
If a Draft sits below the frontier (dominated), Nora suggests specific tweaks that could move it up:- “Reducing top-K from 12 to 6 saves $0.02 per run with no quality change in this dataset.”
- “Enabling reranker adds +5% pass rate for +$0.01 per run.”