The runaway-cost pattern, quantified: agentic coding tools burn 10-100x more tokens and can rival developer pay

The specific runaway-cost incidents — a $47,000 agent loop, a $6,531 AWS retry loop, Uber exhausting its annual budget in four months — are instances of a structural pattern now quantified across the category. Agentic coding tools break each task into long sequences of model calls and resend the growing conversation context on every call, so they consume 10 to 100 times more tokens than a single chat prompt. Teams in 2025–2026 report tripling their bills quarter over quarter with no additional growth in team size, codebase complexity, or delivery velocity, and Gartner has projected AI coding costs could eventually match what developers are paid. Unlike a deletion or a breach, this failure mode is quiet and cumulative — which is exactly why it so often goes untracked until the invoice forces the issue.