How do you decide what to optimize first in production AI agents?
Successful-Ask736 · reddit · 2026-10-09
A Reddit discussion on prioritizing optimizations for production AI agents: when multi-step agents get slow, expensive, or unreliable, developers often reach for model selection or token usage first — but context growth, tool calls, retries, retrieval, and execution paths all affect cost and outcomes. The poster asks practitioners how they identify what actually deserves optimization: comparing repeated runs against task success, manually analyzing traces, or measuring cost per successful task — and which obvious-looking optimization turned out not to be the most valuable.
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