> in my book anything that is (I'm sure well intentioned) and injected to help the agent — but doesn't help it — is a waste of tokens

How do you tell, though? I guess what I'm asking is: the data you presented shows some crazy differences, but the token burn alone doesn't tell us enough. What was the output of the task like? Did the harnesses that burned fewer tokens give you as good a result as the ones that burned more?

I guess it's subjective, of course, but nearly everything about LLM use is...