Token Attribution Framework for Agentic AI in CI/CD

The Silent Killer No One Mentions Until the Bill Comes

Most papers about "agentic AI in production" stop where the problem starts: price. Interacting with Claude or GPT requires a natural pace setter: you, reading the generated text. Take the same agent out of chat mode and drop it into CI/CD, nightly batch, webhook handling; the pacing goes away, and you're running the thing purely on computer time, at computer prices.

The numbers look even scarier when you dig deeper. ReAct-style looped execution prepends all outputs to the following prompts, meaning you consume tokens at roughly O(n²). A PR review agent in a loop of three steps, which costs $0.04 in local development, can rack up a charge of $0.40+ once it gets stuck in its looping process. With hundreds of PRs a week, that could easily amount to five-figure surprises in your bill.