agent-expenditure

agent-expenditure is a skill for Claude Code from athola/claude-night-market. It costs 29 tokens per session (641 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review method for measuring how many tokens AI agents use and how much duplicated work appears after running several agents in parallel. Tokens are the small pieces of text used to measure an AI model's input and output.

In plain words
What is it for?
It reviews multi-agent runs, compares each agent's findings, checks shared-file conflicts, and informs decisions about using fewer or more agents.
Why use it?
It shows whether parallel work was worth its coordination cost and helps identify duplicated effort or file conflicts.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the conserve plugin — 15 skills, 6 commands, 5 agents shipped together

Good fit It reviews multi-agent runs, compares each agent's findings, checks shared-file conflicts, and informs decisions about using fewer or more agents.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/athola/claude-night-market/agent-expenditure
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add athola/claude-night-market --skill agent-expenditure
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/athola/claude-night-market

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install conserve, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 15 skills, 6 commands, 5 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for agent-expenditure

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/agent-expenditure/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/agent-expenditure)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/agent-expenditure"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/agent-expenditure/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for agent-expenditure

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/agent-expenditure"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/agent-expenditure.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 641 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00029 $0.00641
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00320
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00128
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00064

Measured 9d ago against content hash d5daf7d894e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-expenditure scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/conserve/skills/agent-expenditure/SKILL.md · 88 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 88 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Token Waste Monitoring

When To Use

  • After parallel agent dispatch completes
  • When evaluating whether to increase agent count
  • During retrospectives on agent-heavy workflows
  • When plan-before-large-dispatch rule triggers

When NOT To Use

  • Single-agent workflows (no coordination overhead)
  • During active agent execution (post-hoc analysis)
  • For token budgeting (use token-conservation instead)

Brooks's Law for Agents

Dispatching more agents does not always help. Coordination overhead grows with agent count:

Agent Count Expected Overhead Guidance
1-3 Negligible Dispatch freely
4-5 10-15% Acceptable; plan first
6-8 20-30% Monitor closely
9+ 30%+ Likely counterproductive

Coordination overhead is measured as shared-file conflicts: concurrent Read/Write operations on the same file by different agents, as a percentage of total agent runtime.

Post-Dispatch Review Checklist

After parallel agent runs, evaluate:

  1. Did each agent produce unique findings?
  2. Was total token expenditure proportional to value?
  3. Did any agent duplicate another's work?
  4. Would fewer agents have produced the same result?

If 2+ questions answer no, reduce agent count in future dispatches of the same type.

Waste Signals

See modules/waste-signals.md for the 5 waste signal categories and detection criteria.

Cross-References

  • Dispatching 4 or more agents needs an agreed plan first: the roster, each agent's scope, and the output contract it returns. 1-3 agents may dispatch directly.
  • conserve:token-conservation for session-level token budgeting
  • conjure:agent-teams for dispatch coordination

Exit Criteria

  • All 4 post-dispatch review questions answered with explicit yes/no per agent (unique findings, proportional expenditure, no duplication, fewer agents sufficient)
  • Waste signals from modules/waste-signals.md checked against the completed run; any triggered signal named with the category
  • A recommendation is produced: either "reduce agent count to N" or "dispatch was efficient" with coordination overhead percentage
  • If 2+ review questions answer no, a concrete agent-count reduction is stated for future dispatches of the same type

Read the full file on GitHub · 88 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 88 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A d5daf7d894e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-expenditure is a skill published in the GitHub repository athola/claude-night-market (337 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 641 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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