Analyzing and Mitigating Cost-Inefficient Behaviors in Coding Agents

Although effective, coding agents often incur substantial monetary costs. Their recurring *cost-inefficient behaviors* remain underexplored. We conduct a systematic study of behavioral cost inefficiencies in coding agents, analyzing 1,200 trajectories from Claude Code and Mini-SWE-Agent across four configurations on SWE-bench Verified. We identify three cost-inefficient behaviors: *subsumed retrieval*, *similar script generation*, and *test re-execution*. We then evaluate three mitigation strategies: *structure-aware retrieval*, *agent-synthesized skills*, and *developer-designed skills*, over 10k trajectories on held-out SWE-bench Verified and Pro tasks. Our main findings are: (1) The three behaviors affect 79.00%–98.00% of coding tasks and account for up to 22.75% of task cost. (2) Structure-aware retrieval can introduce retrieval overhead and alter agent delegation, causing inconsistent improvements in retrieval efficiency and cost increases of up to 28.14%. (3) Agent-synthesized skills tend to produce low-level, trace-specific guidance, limiting their effectiveness and generality. (4) In contrast, developer-designed skills provide high-level, trace-agnostic guidance, reducing cost by up to 41.73%, roughly twice the maximum gain from agent-synthesized skills.