The setup
Agentic coding tools are astonishingly capable, and astonishingly easy to run expensively. I learned this by watching my own bill, not by doing anything obviously wasteful. There was no single dumb move. The cost came from a thousand small, reasonable-feeling decisions, each of which looked free at the time.
This is the first post in a short series about the structure I built to stop that. Before the fixes, it is worth being precise about where the money actually goes, because most of it hides in places that feel light-touch.
Where an agent bleeds tokens
Five patterns account for most of it.
