Equation 27 · The Economics and Physical Limits of Running AI Agents at Scale
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A retry is not a second, independent request. It is the same step, re-attempted, and because a step’s cost is — a function of how much history has already accumulated by step i — a retry at step one hundred costs roughly as much as step one hundred did the first time, not as much as step one. This is easy to miss if retries are budgeted as a flat percentage overhead on an average request cost, because the average request in a long loop is far cheaper than a late one.
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