The Token Cost of Shell Commands
You asked your AI coding agent to debug a simple test failure, and it somehow ended up recursively reading your entire.git/objects history. If your API bills are climbing while your agent seemingly just browses your codebase, you aren’t alone. Developers often blame the LLM model choice or a poorly written system prompt. But the real budget killer is input context. Your agent isn’t paying to think, it’s paying to re-read a 4,000-line grep output it already understood six turns ago.