标签：#autogen

AutoGen's hidden token tax: why a 3-agent chat costs 15× what you expect Cost-audit series, episode 2. This series began with an AI agent that burned 136M tokens overnight → . AutoGen is Microsoft's multi-agent framework. It's genuinely good at orchestrating agents that hand off work to each other. But its default memory model has a cost shape that surprises almost every team that hits it in production. This audit shows you exactly where the tokens go, with line numbers. The setup: a 3-agent RoundRobin chat The canonical AutoGen pattern is a RoundRobinGroupChat with N agents taking turns on a task. Here's the minimal version from the docs: from autogen_agentchat.agents import AssistantAgent from autogen_agentchat.teams import RoundRobinGroupChat from autogen_agentchat.conditions import MaxMessageTermination planner = AssistantAgent ( " planner " , model_client = client , system_message = " You plan. " ) coder = AssistantAgent ( " coder " , model_client = client , system_message = " You code. " ) reviewer = AssistantAgent ( " reviewer " , model_client = client , system_message = " You review. " ) team = RoundRobinGroupChat ( [ planner , coder , reviewer ], termination_condition = MaxMessageTermination ( max_messages = 10 ), ) await team . run ( task = " Build a web scraper for Hacker News. " ) Three agents, 10 turns total (~3–4 turns each). Seems cheap. It isn't. The default context: unbounded, per-agent Every AssistantAgent gets its own UnboundedChatCompletionContext by default: # autogen-agentchat/src/autogen_agentchat/agents/_assistant_agent.py, __init__ (L708) if model_context is not None : self . _model_context = model_context else : self . _model_context = UnboundedChatCompletionContext () source UnboundedChatCompletionContext.get_messages() returns self._messages — the full list, no cap, no truncation: # autogen-core/.../model_context/_unbounded_chat_completion_context.py (a ~20-line file) async def get_messages ( self ) -> List [ LLMMessage ]: """ Get at most