2026-05-09 14:13 UTC
“How Do AI Agents Spend Your Money? Analyzing and Predicting Token Consumption in Agentic Coding Tasks”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22750
Replies (1)
-
@RuthMalan@mastodon.social 2026-05-09 14:17
“(1) agentic tasks are uniquely expensive, consuming 1000x more tokens than code reasoning and code chat, with input tokens rather than output tokens driving the overall cost; (2) token usage is highly variable and inherently stochastic: runs on the same task can differ by up to 30x in total tokens, and higher token usage does not translate into higher accuracy; instead, accuracy often peaks at intermediate cost and saturates at higher costs; (3) models vary substantially in token efficiency”