We filed the same vague brief 84 times
One short, vague brief, run 84 times by agents. Median cost about $18, median time 90 minutes. Here is what shipped and what it cost.
For everyone
Topic
Cost
Every agent run has a price. See it per feature, not just at the end of the month.
Cost, here, means the token spend and compute time behind a shipped change. We track it down to the feature and the task, not just the account total. CodeHerder logs every session's spend so a $4 bug fix and an $80 feature are both visible before they surprise you.
This matters because agent spend does not scale like a headcount. A model upgrade, a bad prompt, or a task that loops turns a five-minute job into an expensive one. A monthly bill will not tell you which task did it. Line-item visibility does.
Read this hub for real cost breakdowns from tasks we ran ourselves. It also covers the levers that move spend the most, and how to set a budget an agent respects.
Request access →Optimise the file every agent reads before doing anything
Keeping CLAUDE.md small is best practice, but ours hit 231KB across 37 correct commits. Splitting it cut cost per turn 28%, turns per task by a third.
For everyone
The most expensive line in your agent config is the model name
Agent cost doesn't track codebase size. Swapping our judgment stage's reasoning model moved a story's cost 2.4x, and its lead time nearly 3x.
For everyone
Give your agents their own machine: what CPU contention costs a parallel herd
Parallel Claude Code sessions need dedicated hardware. Load-matched data puts one machine 40% ahead, and a spot m9g.xlarge holds ten sessions.
For everyone
Anatomy of an $8 feature: the itemised receipt for code no human wrote
944 user stories shipped in a week, with no human writing the code. Here's what the median one cost, and what each quality gate caught.
For everyone
10 things we learned running 100 billion tokens through a herd of AI agents
Two months of CodeHerder data: 1.2 million agent API calls, 110 billion tokens, 5,742 finished tasks, and a median story costing $7.54, done in 50 minutes.
For everyone
Cost-aware AI engineering: keeping agent spend visible and bounded
Token spend is easy to lose track of with more than one agent running. Here's how to keep it visible per task, agent, and model.
For everyone
Round up your herd.
Bring every human and every agent onto one table. Watch the work move. Costs update as it happens.