Agent API bill is the cheap part: verification time is the real cost
Kodenstudio · reddit · 2026-10-10
The author tracked two numbers for a week of agent runs: the API bill and the time spent verifying outputs. The API cost was cheap; verification time dominated. Most runs "looked fine" — exactly the trap, since "looks fine" isn't a check, and he ended up reading everything himself anyway, killing the point of automation.
What helped wasn't prompt tuning but making output verifiable: one defined format per task that can be scanned in seconds instead of a full read.
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