The optimizer's method for finding cost and waste in the agent workflow - model tier per agent, context loaded per step, redundant and skipped steps, slow or useless checks - and proposing ranked, reversible cuts. Use monthly, on a spend jump, or when the founder asks why something was slow or expensive.
Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.
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---
name: cost-audit
description: The optimizer's method for finding cost and waste in the agent workflow - model tier per agent, context loaded per step, redundant and skipped steps, slow or useless checks - and proposing ranked, reversible cuts. Use monthly, on a spend jump, or when the founder asks why something was slow or expensive.
---
# Cost audit
## Gather (read only)
1. **Spend:** whatever usage export the founder's tools give (per day, per model). If none
exists, say so and estimate from `docs/work/*/status.md` (agents per feature, rounds per
step), labelled as an estimate.
2. **Shape:** for the last few features, which agents ran, how many rounds each step took, how
many times work came back from `qa`.
3. **Context:** the size of `AGENTS.md`, every agent and skill file, and the documents agents
read most. `python tools/run_all.py` prints the files over budget.
4. **Checks:** run time per check from the sweep output; checks that have not failed in months.
## Look for
- Savings counted before they were measured, such as prompt caching assumed in a cost table.
Caches are specific to one provider and expire, so failover and low traffic both erase them.
- An agent on the deep tier doing checklist work, or a fast-tier agent whose work keeps coming
back from review (too cheap is also waste).
- Work that went down the feature track and should have been a fix, or the reverse.
- Reviews repeated with no new input; parallel agents whose output was not used.
- Artifacts passed by content instead of path; whole files read where a grep would do.
- Shared files grown past budget.
- Rework: the costliest waste is a build that fails QA because the spec was thin. Sometimes the
saving is more grilling, not less.
## Propose
`docs/cost/<YYYY-MM-DD>.md`, one table, ranked by saving:
| Change | Saving (measured or estimated) | Risk to quality | How to undo | How we will know in two weeks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Never propose removing a gate, QA, security or legal review. Proposing a cheaper way to run one
is fine. Each accepted proposal becomes an experiment (`skills/experiment/`).
