How do you count one agent 'step'? Reddit debates inflated completion metrics
MemStrata · reddit · 2026-10-31
A Reddit thread argues that agent step counts hide the work inside them: a cached lookup and a 35-call chain can both count as one "step", retries and chunked runs with hard checks can read as 4 or 30 steps depending on the counter — making completion numbers incomparable across teams. OP asks how others define a step and what failure forced that definition.
More from coding & agent
- Thoughtworks CTO: Good developers wary of agentic coding because 'built' isn't 'working in production' — rseroter · 2026-10-31
- Thorsten Ball on agents: always use frontier models, cheaper ones waste your time — danbri · 2026-10-31
- After NVIDIA's BindClaw, every AI4Bio paper now needs an agentic pipeline demo to prove versatility — rishabh16_ · 2026-10-31
- AI agent claims it ordered materials, is negotiating contractors and filing permits for a home build — sanderssays · 2026-10-31
- Game dev rewrote all game logic as XState state machines for clean visualizations — DavidKPiano · 2026-10-31
- Running a multi-model AI agent team off one self-updating Obsidian vault — EXM7777 · 2026-10-31