Can your AI agent be cheaper? Investigating the effects of task specifications on token spend in agentic coding tasks

arXiv cs.AIAugust 27, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2608.25399v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic coding workflows are now widely deployed in real-world systems. With long-horizon reasoning and tool use, token usage has become an important consideration for both cost and efficiency. Two engineers using AI will solve the same problem differently. How the specification of a task shapes an agent's token spend, and whether that spend can be predicted in advance, are open questions. Here, we study the effects of different task specifications on agentic token spend with the Kimi K3 model at three thinking efforts. Across $2,700$ runs, we show that reducing a full task specification to a bare user story raises token spend by $29.7\%$, whil

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