Comment by eugeneonai
4 days ago
The 79% / 67% reduction generalizes broader than IaC. Any CLI agents shell out to (curl, jq, grep, kubectl, gh, psql) burns the same token tax — verbose JSON, free-form text output, agent-composed pipelines. A predicate-flag + compact-output redesign would land on all of those.
Direct answer to your question: agents-writing-IaC-in-prod is rare today but not zero. I see more "agent reviews the IaC PR a human wrote", which Cost.dev sounds well-suited to since verification runs locally and the agent only consumes the result. Even if the prod-IaC path takes another year, the design pattern earns its keep on every agent-shellout you already do. One question: does the CLI surface its cache state to the agent, or does each invocation start fresh Repeated price-fetches across a single agent run would be the obvious next-tier savings.
We do cache the results locally so that we're not repeatedly hitting our pricing API. The LLM doesn't access that cache directly though as it'd suffer the token tax you mention. Instead we optimised our CLI to return agent optimised results. We're constantly iterating and improving on it, but it already reduces the tokens usage very significantly. I wrote about it here: https://www.infracost.io/resources/blog/we-cut-claude-s-toke...
We've found even more improvements since that post so those will be shipping soon too.
Great, will it be possible to see it in your profile?
I'm not sure I follow, which profile do you mean? My profile on HN?
I don't know if we'll keep dissecting every incremental improvement we make as (so far) the general approach is the same as documented in the existing blog post: document common use cases -> benchmark them -> identify bottlenecks/expensive hot spots -> fix them -> repeat
The main thing changing right now is observing new more frequent use cases (either because we're adding new capabilities, or users are doing things we didn't entirely predict) and adding them to the test cases.