On the Hacker News front page on 19 Jul 2026 At Quesma we are researching the economics of AI agents: what agentic coding really costs and what you can do about it. For this research I am running my own deep research setup, a pipeline of agents that builds a knowledge base I can actually trust. The first version of this setup burned the whole limit of my Claude Max 5x plan in 30 minutes. This post is the story of how I fixed the cost and the trust, using only subscriptions I already pay for, and how you can build the same. My goal was to understand the entire state of so-called tokenomics. I wanted to know what monitoring systems exist, how teams govern their AI spend, and which optimization tools and practices actually work, both in the papers and in the real world. I started the usual way, with /deep-research . I gave it the big open question and let it run. After around 30 minutes of research, I hit a limit and had to wait a few hours for it to reset. And I had no results.…