
The Quiet Tax on Your Cheap Agent Tier
Compression is the default answer to the agent bill, and a new three-model, eleven-method audit says the bill is the wrong place to look: quantized and pruned agents lose their head knowledge first, stay confidently wrong about what they lost, and hide subgroup preference flips behind flat bias scores. The same week, the serving side produced cost cuts that touch none of that. Our bet: cheapness comes from the cache before it comes from the weights.











