COST

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.

A $500M accidental Claude bill and an open-weights model beating GPT-5.5 at one-sixth the cost point to the same conclusion: the margin is moving to the layer that decides when to use which model for what. Here is how routing and orchestration differ, and how to cut your model spend.

A complete, citation-backed Claude Code course with setup, prompting systems, MCP, CI, security, cost controls, and capstone workflows.

Automatic reuse of cached context for substantial cost reduction.

2.5x faster Opus at a higher token cost (research preview).

Five managed-agent providers, five pricing models, zero unified cost attribution. If you're running agents overnight, you need FinOps you don't have yet.