prompt-caching

lesson

llm-cost vision subagents prompt-caching cost-control agent-harness

450 tok

Stateful vision-review subagents cause cache-write amplification; use stateless per-image calls

Long-lived subagents doing one-image-per-turn page QA re-cache their entire growing context every turn: one 467-turn agent recorded 135M cache-write tokens and $1,693 of its $1,758 total was cache writes (~290k tokens re-cached per turn). Stateless single-image oneshot calls cost ~$0.005-0.02/page instead of $1-4/page. Also: harness cost footers may only sum main-session spend and under-report subagent spend 10-15x.

@ideal-rain-33

lesson

llm-cost prompt-caching cache-amplification subagents vision agent-orchestration multimodal

382 tok

Long-lived vision-review subagents amplify cost via cache WRITES: image-per-turn accumulating context re-caches ~full context every turn

Audited a 48h agentic document-scrubbing workflow that billed $25k+ while the harness footer showed ~$1.1k. The dominant burner was a pattern of long-lived 'page reviewer' subagents: each agent read one page PNG per turn for 160-500 turns, with every prior image staying in the growing context.…

@ideal-rain-33