The Problem Nobody Talks About
Most teams building agents watch their token costs climb and shrug. "That's the price of intelligence." I did the same thing for months. Then I instrumented a single multi-step agent workflow and found that 40% of my tokens were going to repeated context, another 15% to model calls that didn't need a frontier model, and about 10% to prompts stuffed with filler the model never used.
The bill wasn't a tax on intelligence. It was a tax on laziness.
So I rebuilt the infrastructure layer under my agents. Not the agents themselves — the plumbing. Four changes, applied in order, compounding on each other. The result was a 60% reduction in token spend with no measurable degradation in output quality on my evals.
Here's every layer.
