63% of my agent's context came from one tool

说明与用途

在代理项目中，63%的上下文来自单一工具（bash），每次调用成本最低，而不频繁但昂贵的网络搜索则产生了大部分成本。

问题

Agents often use tools that generate large amounts of context, but the most frequently used tools are not necessarily the most expensive.

结果

The most-used tool (bash) accounted for 63% of context at the lowest cost per call, while a web search tool, used only 20 times, produced 18 times more context per call and was far more expensive.

工作流

• 1. Extract tool call data from the agent’s session database using SQL.
• 2. Aggregate calls and total characters per tool.
• 3. Calculate characters per call and sort by cost per call.
• 4. Identify high-frequency but low-cost tools and low-frequency but high-cost tools.
• 5. Analyze context re-reading by examining cache read tokens.
• 6. Apply optimizations: filter at the tool, count before reading, batch cheap tools and limit expensive ones.

证据

the tools I reach for most are not the ones that cost the most.

来源

bash 1,603 chars per call grep 3,117 read 4,099 scrape a page 10,519 fetch a page 18,548 web search 27,267

来源

Context was re-read roughly 14 times more often than it was first written.

来源