Analyzing and Mitigating Cost-Inefficient Behaviors in Coding Agents

arXiv:2609.30725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although effective, coding agents often incur substantial monetary costs. Their recurring cost-inefficient behaviors remain underexplored. We conduct the first study of behavioral cost inefficiencies in coding agents, analyzing 1,200 trajectories from Claude Code and Mini-SWE-Agent across four configurations on SWE-bench Verified. We identify three cost-inefficient behaviors: subsumed retrieval, similar script generation, and test re-execution. We then evaluate three mitigation strategies: structure-aware retrieval, agent-synthesized skills, and developer-designed skills, over 10k trajectories on held-out SWE-bench Verified and Pro tasks. Our main findings are: (1) The three behaviors affect 79.00\%--98.00\% of coding tasks and account for up to 22.75\% of task cost. (2) Structure-aware retrieval can introduce retrieval overhead and alter agent delegation, causing inconsistent improvements in retrieval efficiency and cost increases of up to 28.14\%. (3) Agent-synthesized skills tend to produce low-level, trace-specific guidance, limiting their effectiveness and generality. (4) In contrast, developer-designed skills provide high-level, trace-agnostic guidance, reducing cost by up to 41.73\%, roughly twice the maximum gain from agent-synthesized skills.

Abstract:Although effective, coding agents often incur substantial monetary costs. Their recurring cost-inefficient behaviors remain underexplored. We conduct the first study of behavioral cost inefficiencies in coding agents, analyzing 1,200 trajectories from Claude Code and Mini-SWE-Agent across four configurations on SWE-bench Verified. We identify three cost-inefficient behaviors: subsumed retrieval, similar script generation, and test re-execution. We then evaluate three mitigation strategies: structure-aware retrieval, agent-synthesized skills, and developer-designed skills, over 10k trajectories on held-out SWE-bench Verified and Pro tasks. Our main findings are: (1) The three behaviors affect 79.00\%--98.00\% of coding tasks and account for up to 22.75\% of task cost. (2) Structure-aware retrieval can introduce retrieval overhead and alter agent delegation, causing inconsistent improvements in retrieval efficiency and cost increases of up to 28.14\%. (3) Agent-synthesized skills tend to produce low-level, trace-specific guidance, limiting their effectiveness and generality. (4) In contrast, developer-designed skills provide high-level, trace-agnostic guidance, reducing cost by up to 41.73\%, roughly twice the maximum gain from agent-synthesized skills.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Software Engineering (cs.SE)

arXiv:2609.30725 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.30725v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30725 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Analyzing and Mitigating Cost-Inefficient Behaviors in Coding Agents

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