
Programming
Jun 7, 2026Hacker News
Quantifying Token Use in Agentic Software Engineering: Where Costs Lie
LLM-based Multi-Agent (LLM-MA) systems automate complex software tasks, but their token consumption, and thus costs, are poorly understood. New research analyzing the ChatDev framework with GPT-5 reveals that the iterative Code Review stage consumes a striking 59.4% of tokens, with input tokens making up 53.9% of total consumption. This indicates that the primary cost in agentic software engineering lies in refinement and verification, not initial generation, offering crucial insights for cost prediction and workflow optimization.
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