Your coding agent just spent 10 million tokens to fix a single bug. Is it worth it? 😉
Other researchers have found similar results. Bai et al. (2026) measured coding agents on real software tasks and found they consume roughly 1,000 times the tokens of an ordinary chatbot interaction. And these sort of agents tasks represent the most rapid driver of increased AI usage; Anthropic’s Economic Index found that 97% of their API usage now show “automation-dominant” patterns associated with agents.
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theclimatebrink.com/p/the-real…
The real energy use of agentic AI
Agents use about 600x more energy than simple AI promptsZeke Hausfather (The Climate Brink)