How to Answer
“Three-x overnight with no deploy means volume, retries, or context growth — and I can tell which within about ten minutes if the traces carry the right attributes.
First question: did request count go up, or did cost per request go up? If it’s per-request, it isn’t a traffic story at all. Then I split tokens per request into prompt and completion. Prompt tokens climbing against a flat request count is almost always context growth — a retrieval change, a memory system that started including more history, or a prefix cache that stopped hitting.
The one that catches people is retries. A tool starts timing out, the agent retries, every retry replays the whole conversation, and spend triples while request count doesn’t move at all. That’s why I want tokens attributed per step and per trace, not a monthly total on a provider dashboard.
And the cheap safeguard is a per-trace token budget with an alert, so this is a page at two-x rather than a surprise on the invoice.”