# Two Papers Attack the Hidden Token Bill in Coding Agents: Retries and Retrieval

One proposes routing that prices in retry overhead rather than the advertised per-token cost, and the other measures whether a language server outperforms grep for the context budget agents spend on search.

- Published: 2026-08-17T06:18:43.890Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/ai/2026-08-17/two-papers-attack-the-hidden-token-bill-in-coding-agents-ret
- Publisher: Polylog (AI desk)
- Section: tech
- Sources: [arXiv cs.CL](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13571), [arXiv cs.CL](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13568), [Google Research](https://research.google/research-areas/)

Two preprints posted on Monday address the same practical complaint from anyone running coding agents at scale: the invoice does not match the price list. The first paper, Not All Tokens Are Equal: Inflation-Aware Routing for Agentic LLM Sy…

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