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Your agent ran fine all week, then burned $2,000 overnight. Find where the tokens went and cut the bill without losing quality.

The provider bill tells you the total and nothing else. This is a forensics question, and the answer is almost never a pricey model. It is that the transcript grows every turn, so a forty step run costs six times what everyone estimated.

Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

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UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY

Next in this trackThe customer's corpus grew from one million documents to ten million and retrieval p99 tripled. Your code did not change. Find out why.Next in this trackYou upgraded the embedding model and re-embedded the corpus. Nothing errored, no alert fired, and answer quality fell. Find out why.Next in this trackYour agent writes what it learns into memory. A wrong conclusion from three weeks ago now shapes every answer. Find it and remove it.

FEDITOR'S NOTE

Two things separate strong answers. The first is refusing to name a fix before naming a step: candidates who open with 'switch to a smaller model' have skipped the diagnosis and usually cut quality to save the wrong 15%. The second is doing the arithmetic out loud. An agent loop resends its whole transcript every turn, so input tokens grow quadratically in turn count, and once you see that you also see why the cheapest fix is a cap on loop length rather than a cheaper model.

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