A broken agent router burned 30.2M tokens in 3.5 hours on Claude Code
RileyRalmuto · x · 2026-07-21
A user reports that an agent routing setup burned through **30.2 million tokens in 3.5 hours** while they were asleep. ### What happened - The fleet was supposed to use cheaper external models first. - Because the OpenRouter key was dead and direct Anthropic/OpenAI paths were down, requests fell through to a last-resort **Claude Code / Opus 4.8** path. - The loop never idled and kept firing roughly every 30 minutes. ### Why it mattered - The expensive fallback ended up handling memory maintenance and session-history sweeps. - The poster says this consumed about **93% of all spend** and nearly half of a 5-hour usage window.
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