AI Agents, Engineered

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Figure 19.1: Cost as a snowball of paper rolling downhill: every pass, the whole accumulated mass rolls through the toll again, so the bill grows multiplicatively, not linearly

Four passes of an agent loop, each drawn as a transcript bar passing through a toll gate; the bar grows by one step's tokens every pass, so the illustrative ten-step run bills about 77,000 input tokens rather than the 32,000 a naive estimate predicts.
Figure 19.1 Cost as a snowball of paper rolling downhill: every pass, the whole accumulated mass rolls through the toll again, so the bill grows multiplicatively, not linearly.