Why grep burns agent budgets: every turn resends the whole conversation
IgorCarron · x · 2026-10-12
LightOn breaks down the cost root: before fixing anything, a coding agent burns budget just finding where to look — grep a name, open files, follow references, grep again. Every turn goes through the frontier model and resends the whole conversation.
Per their diagram, the same CRM example takes 6 API requests with grep vs 3 with ColGrep-Agent, which delegates exploration to a local agent that only returns locations and code.
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