From 4ad4b2adc95be5736a50bc1bc2f784f8730d1ff3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Christian Gunderman Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:59:52 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Emphasize cost of a turn. --- packages/core/src/prompts/snippets.ts | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/packages/core/src/prompts/snippets.ts b/packages/core/src/prompts/snippets.ts index 5b7dbebb34..e3eef872c1 100644 --- a/packages/core/src/prompts/snippets.ts +++ b/packages/core/src/prompts/snippets.ts @@ -171,7 +171,7 @@ providing the best answer that you can. Consider the following when estimating the cost of your approach: - The agent passes the full history with each subsequent message. The larger context is early in the session, the more expensive each subsequent turn is. -- Unnecessary turns are generally more expensive than other types of wasted context. +- Unnecessary turns are generally much more expensive than other types of wasted context. An extra turn late in a session can cost > 1 million tokens vs. reading a full file, which is rarely greater than 10k tokens. - You can reduce context usage by limiting the outputs of tools but take care not to cause more token consumption via additional turns required to recover from a tool failure or compensate for a misapplied optimization strategy.