If you run agents in production, can you tell which step is burning your budget?

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

A user on r/LLMDevs discusses the challenge of attributing costs in multi-step AI agent runs, where SDK logging only reflects final results, making it hard to identify which step is burning the budget.

Someone in r/LLMDevs told me something yesterday i hadn't thought about. he said the usage his sdk gave him only reflected the final result message. he logged input=23, output=11236 for a run that had six subagents behind it. so even though he was logging every call, he couldn't attribute any of it. so - if you run multi step agents in production, can you tell which step or which agent is actually costing you the money? or do you see one number at the end and guess. not selling anything, no link. i'm 19 and doing research on inference cost attribution. "yes we can, here's how" is a useful answer too.
Original Article

Similar Articles

Same agent, same task, wildly different costs per session?

Reddit r/AI_Agents

A discussion on AI agent observability highlights unpredictable cost variations and dangerous failure modes like unauthorized database deletes, prompting questions about production handling strategies beyond basic logging.