UC Berkeley's Agency Cuts Agent Harness Costs by Up to 35%
The practical shift here is that cost optimisation moves from model selection to infrastructure — a middleware layer can be reused across Claude Code, Codex and other harnesses. Engineering leads running production agents should audit trace logs for repeated context reads and unnecessary tool calls before upgrading to a costlier model. Teams in cost-sensitive markets, including ASEAN startups paying USD-denominated API bills, gain a lever that compounds across every harness they deploy.
