The token tax nobody budgets for — and why it hits the tightest budgets hardest
Article summary
Quick briefing — cleaned from the original RSS feed
Most write-ups about AI agents are about prompts, tools, and evals. Almost none are about the line item that quietly dominates a real deployment: the context tokens you pay for on every single turn. Here is the mechanic. A typical agent loop re-sends the whole conversation so far on each step, so the model can "remember" what happened. Turn 1 sends a little. Turn 20 re-sends everything from turns 1–19 again . Across a session, the input-token cost does not grow with the amount of work done — it…
1Key Takeaways
- Most write-ups about AI agents are about prompts, tools, and evals.
- Almost none are about the line item that quietly dominates a real deployment: the context tokens you pay for on every single turn.
- A typical agent loop re-sends the whole conversation so far on each step, so the model can "remember" what happened.
- Turn 20 re-sends everything from turns 1–19 again .
2AIWedia Score
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3Why it matters
Coding AI shifts how fast software ships and how much human review each change needs. DEV — ML reports that most write-ups about AI agents are about prompts, tools, and evals.
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