Agent Token Breakdown: Only 50 of 1,300 Tokens Are Orchestration, Cutting Incident Cost to $0.001
kalyan_kpl · x · 2026-09-04
jgolebiowski of Distil Labs audited the token accounting of their incident-response agent harness: only 50 of 1,300 tokens go to orchestration; the rest is narrow domain work that can be trained into a model. By moving that work, per-incident cost drops from $0.07 to $0.001. Takeaway: domain specialization, not orchestration, dominates agent cost — internalizing it via fine-tuning is the key lever.
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