One question to your coding agent: 6x speedup and 8x cost cut

venturetwins · x · 2026-10-12

venturetwins shares a surprisingly effective prompting trick: after a coding agent ships a new feature, simply ask it "is there a more efficient way than what you're doing?".

He reports this single follow-up question yielded a 6x speed increase and 8x cost reduction on Astra — and jokes about why the agent didn't just pick the better approach the first time. The takeaway: agents often default to workable-but-suboptimal implementations, and explicitly pressing them on efficiency unlocks significant gains.

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