Study Finds Vague Prompts Cause Coding Agents to Waste 7x Compute
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-08-15
A new paper highlights 'prompt-induced waste' in coding agents. Instructions asking agents to consider multiple approaches or be 'absolutely certain' lead them to generate and discard alternatives or perform redundant checks. Experiments showed this increased reasoning compute by 2.4–7.4x (up to 18.25x) without success gains. The paper advises designing concrete stopping rules to reduce unnecessary work.
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