How Do AI Agents Spend Your Money? Analyzing and Predicting Token Consumption in Agentic Coding Tasks

arXiv:2604.22750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The wide adoption of AI agents in complex human workflows is driving rapid growth in LLM token consumption. When agents are deployed on tasks that require a significant amount of tokens, three questions naturally arise: (1) Where do AI agents spend the tokens? (2) Which models are more token-efficient? and (3) Can agents predict their token usage before task execution? In this paper, we present the first systematic study of token consumption patt