Multi-agent LLM pipelines can triple token costs—here’s the hidden penalty
Switching from a single LLM call to a LangGraph‑orchestrated multi‑agent setup silently tripled token usage because each agent carries its own prompts and a supervisory node adds hidden token overhead. The author traced the leak, tried cutting fan‑out, and finally solved it by consolidating system prompts and pruning redundant context, cutting costs back to baseline.