Your Agent Loop Has a Compounding Cost Problem

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 03:14:36 +0000

A 30-step AI workflow doesn’t cost 30 times a single API call. It costs closer to 465 times, because the model re-reads every previous message on every single turn. That’s not a quirk you can optimize around at the margins. It’s baked into how stateless LLM APIs work, and if you’re building anything non-trivial with agents, it’s quietly eating your budget in a way that compound interest would recognize immediately.

Ai-Infrastructure on BRYSGO

Your Agent Loop Has a Compounding Cost Problem