They Added a No-Progress Kill for Agents — Cost Fell 19%, But Cost per Successful Task Rose
Specialist_Dish_9087 · reddit · 2026-09-12
- A team added a no-progress kill (3 identical tool calls → stop). Total bill dropped 19%, but cost per successful task went up, two months running.
- Why: runs that used to flail for 30 minutes then succeed carried all that flailing in their cost; now they stop at 4 minutes, so money still goes out with nothing to divide it by.
- Someone suggested turning the kill off to improve the metric — a red flag that the KPI incentivizes bad behavior.
- They now report two numbers: unit cost, plus share of monthly spend on zero-output runs (a quarter last month).
- Open problem: user-aborted runs, verifier rejections, and runs hitting the ceiling while still progressing all look identical in tagging — deciding which flailing runs matter remains unsolved.
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