Dev Tools · 1h ago
Open-source profiler reveals 40% of AI agent costs are overhead
A new open-source tool, AI Agent Profiler, acts as a reverse proxy to track token usage in coding agents like Claude Code. It found that only 60% of API costs go to actual prompts, with subagent exploration and cache rewrites eating the rest. The tool also exposes the expensive 5-minute cache TTL penalty that compounds in long sessions.
Meridian48 take
The profiler's honest admission that its own optimization attempts failed underscores how little control developers have over agent cost structures.
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AI Agent Profiler — Measure agent cost, cache waste, and context bloat →
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