UCLA and Northeastern paper finds 18% of agent tokens removable
The non-obvious takeaway is that token waste is a property of the task and harness, not the model, so harness design changes may cut costs more than switching to a cheaper model. Engineering teams running coding agents or long multi-step workflows can use the proxy-and-rerun method to audit their own traces. The Kimi-K3 result on SWE-bench Verified shows a 41% token cut with success intact, a concrete benchmark for anyone comparing agent efficiency across frontier models.
