Code mode yields a 99.2% cost reduction in our systems
4 hours ago
- The article measures the efficiency of 'code mode' where an agent executes a script internally to make multiple API calls, avoiding sequential tool calls that pass raw data through the model's context.
- A specific script (workflow-triage) made 26 internal calls and returned a single result, reducing characters reaching the context by ~126x (from ~3.26M to 25,811), tokens by ~99.2% (from ~815,000 to ~6,450), cost from ~$2.44 to ~$0.02, and time from minutes to 13.12 seconds.
- The approach is already deployed in their swarm via system prompts; this measurement provides concrete numbers to sharpen the rubric.
- The token reduction holds across different models (e.g., claude-opus-4-8, gpt-5.5), with input cost savings proportional to the reduction.