Where do all the tokens go in AI agent sessions?

Reddit r/AI_Agents 08/17/26, 03:23 PM News

Summary

The article analyzes token distribution in AI agent sessions, noting that most tokens go to context and tool results rather than final output, suggesting that not all need frontier models.

I've been looking at where the tokens actually go during long-running agent sessions. A lot of the spend goes into resent context, tool results and reasoning, while only a small part becomes the final output. Most of that overhead doesn't necessarily need a frontier model. Made this breakdown while digging into agent token usage. If you're interested, I've dropped the full analysis in the comments. How are you guys tracking token usage and costs across your agents?

Original Article

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