Coding agent overhead was ~90% of spend; task-based attribution cut it to 45% in 5 weeks
entelligenceai17 · reddit · 2026-11-06
A team audited their AI coding agent bills and found most spend went not to shipping code but to exploration, retries, and compaction — around 90% overhead.
They tracked usage in several ways, changed their cost attribution model, and shifted from token-level to per-task accounting. Within 5 weeks, exploration plus overhead dropped from 90% to 45%. A full write-up is linked in the comments.
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