Do AI Agent Costs Grow Exponentially? I Ran My Logs and the Answer Surprised Me

Do AI Agent Costs Grow Exponentially? I Ran My Logs and the Answer Surprised Me A Hacker News thread hit 208 points this week asking whether AI agent costs grow exponentially with complexity. The discussion is mostly theoretical — mathematical models, algorithmic complexity analysis, extrapolations. Interesting stuff. But I have something better: months of real logs from agents I've been running in production and in personal projects. And the empirical answer is completely different from what th