ran a usage report at the end of the day and had to double check the total. 4,294.6M tokens, 3 sessions, one day, one person. the breakdown is where it gets weird: input 2.2M. output 11.4M. cache read 4,192.8M. cache write 88.2M. so 97.6% of everything was cache reads. the agents wrote about 11 million tokens of actual new text all day, which is 0.3% of the total. everything else was them re-reading their own context on every tool call. that’s the real shape of agent economics and your bill never shows it to you this way. the number that actually got me: 149.4M of it was human initiated. 4,145.2M was agent continuations. 96.5% of the day happened without me typing anything. friction from the same report: 28 correction loops (an agent went down a wrong path and had to get walked back) 8 context compactions (agent hit its limit, summarized itself, came back missing details) 2 tool failure retries estimated cost at api list prices: $3,091.76. i’m on a subscription so i didn’t pay that, but that’s what the compute would bill at. blended rate was $0.72 per million because cache reads are cheap. model split: opus did 3,886.3M of the 4,294.6M, about 90%. sonnet handled 129.9M of the small stuff. the gap on long tasks is still very real. what i took away from staring at this: correction loops cost more than tokens. every one of the 28 happened for the same boring reason, the agent was working from stale information about something that had changed elsewhere. compactions are the silent killer. after each one the agent comes back confident and missing half its context. anything not written down somewhere durable is just gone. 9.7 output tokens/sec per stream. parallel streams are the only reason any of this finishes in a day. disclosure so nobody has to ask: the report comes from a tool i’m building (aethereum, the usage command is free, npx aethereum usage). but the numbers are the point, ccusage shows you a lot of the same picture. anyone tracked their human-initiated vs agent-continuation split? curious whether 96.5% is high or normal for people running agents hard. submitted by /u/KangarooPitiful594
Originally posted by u/KangarooPitiful594 on r/ClaudeCode