Token economics dominate the cost of agent projects

An agent that reads files, calls tools, and iterates on output burns tokens at every step. A task that costs $0.03 in a single LLM call can cost $3.00 when wrapped in an agent loop with context management (see: context management is the dominant variable in agent quality and cost), tool calls, and retries. After a model update that degrades performance, the same task can consume 2 to 3 times the tokens for the same result.

Budget for token economics from day one, not just price per token. Track cost per task, not just total spend. Use code intelligence (see: code intelligence replaces dozens of grep calls with one graph query) tools to cut exploration tokens. Use structured outputs to reduce retry loops. The cheapest agent project is the one where you measured cost early and designed for it.