Evaluation & Operations
Managing Agent Cost and Latency
Control model calls, context growth, tool delays, retries, and quality tradeoffs in multi-step systems.
Measure complete tasks
Per-call metrics hide the cost of loops and retries. Track tokens, tool time, wall-clock duration, and spend from goal to verified outcome.
Reduce unnecessary decisions
Move deterministic routing and validation into code, summarize stale context, cache safe results, and batch independent work. Fewer model turns often improve reliability as well as speed.
Route by difficulty
Use smaller or faster models for simple structured steps and reserve stronger reasoning for ambiguous decisions. Evaluate the full routing policy because one weak step can dominate task failure.