Equation 8 · The Economics, Energy, and Physical Limits of Tool Protocols and the Model Context Protocol
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Model it simply. Suppose a session runs for k turns, and each turn adds on average tokens of new tool result to a transcript that is resent in full on every request, because nothing is evicting or compressing it. The tokens billed on turn i include roughly i tokens of accumulated result history, so the total billed across the whole session is
Sources cited in the article section
- [4] Function calling ↗
- [3] Prompt caching ↗
- [7] Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts ↗
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