Agent Overhead: Context Resend and Reasoning Dominate Costs
entelligenceai17 · reddit · 2026-08-23
The author analyzes where tokens actually go during long-running AI agent sessions. Most spend is not on final output, but on resending context, tool results, and reasoning. The post highlights that many "cost optimizations" are counterproductive: cutting too much context degrades answer quality, leading to retries that cost more than the savings. A breakdown of the biggest cost drivers is provided.
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