The AI agent habit that was quietly wasting my time and tokens

The AI Agent Habit That Was Quietly Wasting My Time and Tokens

Tags: ai, localai, machinelearning, productivity, agents

I realized I had been using AI agents in a way that looked smart but was actually pretty wasteful.

The pattern was simple: I would ask the agent for something useful, it would go off and figure it out, and eventually I would get an answer. The problem is that if you keep asking the agent to rediscover the same process over and over, you are paying for repeated reasoning, repeated tool usage, and repeated trial and error. That means more tokens, more latency, and more opportunities for the agent to fumble.

What finally clicked for me was this: use LLM inference for decisions, not for repetition.