{
  "schema_version": "newruntime-agent-readable-v0.1",
  "type": "trend_pattern",
  "slug": "agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work",
  "title": "Agent economics moves to completed work",
  "description": "Token prices and subscription fees are weak proxies when turns, retries, delegation, verification, latency, and successful outcomes drive the real cost.",
  "thesis": "The economically meaningful unit for agent systems is becoming cost per verified completed task rather than cost per token or model call.",
  "status": "published",
  "confidence": "high",
  "first_seen": "2026-06-27",
  "last_verified": "2026-07-15",
  "supporting_signals": [
    "tg-2696",
    "tg-2668",
    "tg-2676",
    "tg-2646",
    "tg-2545"
  ],
  "related_posts": [
    "coding-agent-cost-environment-config",
    "ridge-ai-spend-process-cost",
    "model-match-effort-selection"
  ],
  "counter_evidence": [
    "Token accounting remains necessary for capacity planning and can approximate cost in simple, stable, single-call workflows.",
    "Task-level attribution can be expensive or ambiguous when one agent run contributes to several downstream outcomes."
  ],
  "revision_trigger": "Revise the thesis if token-level optimization reliably predicts lower total task cost without measuring failures, retries, human review, or completion quality.",
  "topics": [
    "agent-economics",
    "model-routing",
    "product-metrics"
  ],
  "source_urls": [
    "https://cognition.com/blog/making-fable-cheaper-than-opus",
    "https://databricks.com/blog/benchmarking-coding-agents-databricks-multi-million-line-codebase",
    "https://claude.com/blog/claude-model-and-effort-level-in-claude-code",
    "https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-use/advisor-tool",
    "https://engineering.ramp.com/post/ai-spend-value"
  ],
  "routes": {
    "html": "https://newruntime.com/patterns/agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work/",
    "markdown": "https://newruntime.com/patterns/agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work.md",
    "json": "https://newruntime.com/patterns/agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work.json"
  },
  "source_format": "markdown"
}