How devs are stopping multi-step agents from blowing up token costs

useralltime_835 · reddit · 2026-11-07

A Reddit poster shares practical tactics for taming token costs in multi-step agents: a 3-step agent ballooned to 15 tool calls per task because each step re-sent the full history. Trimming context to only what the next step needs, summarizing older turns, and caching the system prompt cut the bill by more than half with no quality drop. The thread invites other approaches to keeping agent runs lean.

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