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Posted by moonikakiss 10 hours ago

Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale(www.databricks.com)
191 points | 182 commentspage 2
XCSme 4 hours ago|
As a solo dev, this gives me hope.

I feel like I have an advantage over big companies, if I can use the best models on a subscription and not worry about costs much, when they can't do the same as outlined in the article.

pwendell 8 hours ago||
I authored this - happy to answer any questions.
wxw 9 hours ago||
> Rapidly adopting newer, more efficient models delivers the largest cost wins of any technique.

I think the more interesting lever is the fourth they mention: token efficiency.

> By the time costly LLM inference occurs, the user's initial statement accounts for only a negligible fraction of the data fed into the AI system, meaning costs are dominated by context the user did not explicitly include.

I think there’s still lots of low hanging fruit in regards to monitoring and improving agent work. Look at your sessions. Look at how much time and context is being spent on, say, a web search returning dozens of results when one good single-pager doc would’ve been better.

ankitmathur 8 hours ago|
100% - there's a lot to learn from traces from real-life sessions with coding tools! For example, I found it pretty eye-opening to see how wide the distribution of tasks truly is. There's also subtle things like how a poorly designed MCP API surface can cause a massive amount of token waste from the model just iterating on finding the right way to call it.
aliasxneo 9 hours ago||
First time hearing of Omnigent. Anyone have experience using it?
deathmonger5000 5 hours ago||
If you’re into web based meta-harnesses you might like Circus Chief: https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief

Similar idea re using the same UI across all models, but the agent can modify the harness config as well as start/schedule sessions, etc. The Kanban board feature can be used to orchestrate agent driven workflows, and the agent itself can modify the Kanban lanes. Basically the agent can do all the same things you use the UI for.

Example prompt: “schedule a session using Opus 5 with max thinking for every feature in the PRD on the canvas. For every session make the prompt instruct the agent to review end to end test coverage for the feature and create a report on the canvas for test gaps that you find. Schedule the sessions overnight tonight spread evenly throughout the night, and have each session set to retry upon token exhaustion.”

I think it’s more meta than other meta-harnesses, but I’m biased because it’s my pet project.

notduckrabbit 8 hours ago|||
I've tested Omnigent superficially, attracted to its thinking around policy, governance, sandboxing, and ui. But it's still alpha at present. I forked its Polly model and got working a somewhat more complex multiagent workflow that I've also modeled in Sandcastle and Gas City but the agent broke after the next update which I would have needed to patch to maintain functionality. Subjectively I also noticed individual models seemed to be performing somewhat worse when wrapped in the platform's framework, presumably due to the extra context introduced (token use was measurably higher). Promising project that I'll revisit when it's further along and I do not doubt the outcomes Databricks claims in committedly dogfooding it.
DenisM 5 hours ago||
Double-harnessing distortions seems like a weak point. I wonder if it’s just a temporary measure and long term it’s about writing custom harness going straight to inference APIs across all models.
vehemenz 7 hours ago||
I've been using it for a week or so. The main draw for me is that I can keep my sessions in one database regardless of the model/provider I use. The webapp can access everything remotely, which is convenient when I'm on my phone.

I haven't gotten a chance to test the multi-agent capabilities, but the DeepSeek Flash prices are so low that I probably will soon.

lubujackson 9 hours ago||
These seem like the obvious tweaks akin to "using a cheaper hosting platform". I think the real savings come from careful context control for programmatic agents, careful tool awareness and usage to reduce thrashing, distilling workflows into deterministic processes and, moat importantly, adding friction and boundaries for non-technical users who tend to burn tokens making insane asks like "analyze all documents and give me a summary".
vira28 3 hours ago||
Reads like an add to Omnigent or whatever harness (wait it’s meta harness?.
DenisM 5 hours ago||
How can Smart Router achieve higher task completion rate compared to any of the base models if all it does is dynamically switch base models based on cost??
semessier 3 hours ago||
not sure about the use of exponential and efficiency frontier here, these have formal sides to them but seem to be used rather inflationary and colloquially.
behat 7 hours ago||
Appreciate the detail in this and the previous post on creating internal benchmarks!

Have you all attempted finetuning smaller OSS models on your repos for coding?

pwendell 6 hours ago|
We do this for a lot of our customers (fine tuned to save cost when inference volume is high). Right now for internal coding we are using off-the-shelf models but we are considering fine tuning as well to squeeze more efficiency out.
throwatdem12311 3 hours ago|
“use lower cost models”

“use price controls”

Truly revolutionary stuff.

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