Analyzing and Mitigating Cost-Inefficient Behaviors in Coding Agents

arXiv cs.AISeptember 28, 2026en

arXiv:2609.30725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although effective, coding agents often incur substantial monetary costs. Their recurring cost-inefficient behaviors remain underexplored. We conduct the first study of behavioral cost inefficiencies in coding agents, analyzing 1,200 trajectories from Claude Code and Mini-SWE-Agent across four configurations on SWE-bench Verified. We identify three cost-inefficient behaviors: subsumed retrieval, similar script generation, and test re-execution. We then evaluate three mitigation strategies: structure-aware retrieval, agent-synthesized skills, and developer-designed skills, over 10k trajectories on held-out SWE-bench Verified and Pro tasks. Our m

This is a short summary published by AI Global Wire. The full article is owned and hosted by arXiv cs.AI — open it there to read it in full.

• Anthropic
• Forskning
• Agenter