I Cut My AI Agent's Token Bill by 62% in One Weekend. Here's the Receipts. (opens in new tab)

My agent spent $5.40 to do what a 200-line script does for free. Then I spent a weekend fixing it, and brought the same workflow down to $2.05 per run — a 62% drop with no measurable quality regression. This is the breakdown, with the actual prompt diffs and the benchmarks that mattered. The starting point: a single agent, three habits, $847/mo The agent I run most is a research-and-summarize loop. It searches the web, scrapes ~20 pages, drafts a structured summary, and writes a file. Sounds ...