{"type":"post","id":"how-do-ai-agents-waste-your-money-framework-4b5aa5","slug":"how-do-ai-agents-waste-your-money-framework-4b5aa5","title":"How Do AI Agents Waste Your Money? framework measures removable token waste across agent harnesses","description":"An arXiv paper introduces a framework for locating removable text in AI-agent trajectories and measuring its token cost.","retrieval_nugget":"An arXiv paper introduces a framework for locating removable text in AI-agent trajectories and measuring its token cost. In experiments on two agent benchmarks, online pruning removed 41–46% of reasoning while largely preserving task performance, suggesting that harness and task design may matter as much as model choice for reducing waste.","published_at":"2026-11-06","updated_at":"2026-11-06","record_date":"2026-11-06","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["agent-economics"],"entities":["arXiv","How Do AI Agents Waste Your Money?","Huimin Zeng","Yuxuan Lu","Jesse Cai"],"related_patterns":["agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work"],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"A new framework identifies removable token waste across agent harnesses and reports pruning 41–46% of reasoning while largely preserving task performance.","prior_refs":[],"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07238","source_urls":["https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07238"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:how-do-ai-agents-waste-your-money-framework-4b5aa5","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-do-ai-agents-waste-your-money-framework-4b5aa5/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-do-ai-agents-waste-your-money-framework-4b5aa5.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-do-ai-agents-waste-your-money-framework-4b5aa5.json"},"markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/how-do-ai-agents-waste-your-money-framework-4b5aa5.md","next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/agent-economics/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics/","title":"Agent Economics","reason":"Explore the agent-economics topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/sources/","url":"https://newruntime.com/sources/","title":"Sources","reason":"See the original sources this archive cites.","media_type":"text/html"}]}