The expensive part of coding agents isn't the agents—it's the silent retries ($900 for one task)
mrtrly · reddit · 2026-09-09
A dev running 1,000 coding agent runs/month priced a month at API rates: tasks cost $5 each, but silent retry loops dominated cost—one task retried 100+ times, worth $900, producing nothing. Flat pricing meant no bill to expose it. His fix: baseline each run's expected cost and kill anything 3x over, though he calls it a band-aid and asks how others track per-run costs.
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