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.
More from coding & agent
- GPT-6 Astra beats Factorio with enemies in 44 in-game hours at ~$4,500 API cost — liminal_bardo · 2026-09-11
- Investment Analyst Asks How to Build a Claude-Based Diligence Agent Stack — Careless_Tie2286 · 2026-09-11
- Treating agents like 50 First Dates: a 3-layer context system so every conversation doesn't start from zero — evielync · 2026-09-11
- Running the Firefox MCP on Android via Termux, ngrok, and mcp-proxy — Nervous-Strain7544 · 2026-09-11
- SmolVM open-sources persistent computer infrastructure for agents that outlive chat sessions — aniketmaurya · 2026-09-11
- ARRM targets silent economic regressions in AI agents that functional tests miss — Beautiful_Belt_601 · 2026-09-11