I Turned on Agent Tracing for 30 Days. 4 Hidden Bottlenecks Were Eating 47% of My Tokens. - DEV Community
A production Claude agent had been quietly burning 5.2M tokens a month. I turned on per-call tracing for 30 days, found four bottlenecks no dashboard surfaced, and cut the bill in half without touching the agent's behavior. Here are the four bottlenecks and the trace queries that found them.