Coding agents waste up to 22.75% of task budgets
Coding agents repeatedly spend money on redundant retrieval, similar scripts, and rerunning tests, and these behaviors affect 79% to 98% of SWE-bench tasks. The study analyzed 1,200 trajectories, then tested fixes across 10k tasks. Developer-designed skills, meaning reusable high-level guidance, cut costs by up to 41.73%, while structure-aware retrieval sometimes raised costs by 28.14%.