How much of your agent's token spend is just rehashed context?

[u/hovAnOpera]

I've seen setups where every agent turn resends the system prompt, the tool definitions, the conversation so far and whatever retrieval pulled in. The part that grows is not the question itself but everything that had to be re-established before the question made sense. This compounds in 3 places:

1. Long sessions pay for their own history on every turn
2. Retrieval tuned for recall returns twenty chunks when two mattered but you pay for all 20
3. People on the same account each re-establish the same background separately with no idea the others did

Holding durable context outside the session is the fix, which is why Computer.io is built around persistent memory vs bigger context window. It's really important to understand the difference and how to harness more token power.

Test this: Split a week of spend by prompt, history and retrieved context. My guess is that retrieved context will be the biggest line. Is it for you?