Prompt-Induced Waste in Coding Agents: Reasoning, Effort, Harness Design, and End-to-End Cost
Coding-agent efficiency cannot be characterized by token count or model price alone. End-to-end cost and task success depend jointly on prompt semantics, inference effort, harness policy, model, task difficulty, tool use, context management, and provider accounting. Controlled experiments show that prompt wording can change reasoning and verification behavior without changing the task, that additional inference effort can help on difficult tasks but can also add cost without benefit, and that the value of an efficiency intervention can change when the harness changes. These results show that prompt, effort, and harness are interacting experimental factors rather than independent controls....
| Authors | Sarel Weinberger, Amir Hozez |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 September 2026 |
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