Martin Alderson on making agents fast: check thinking budgets first

Alderson applies web-performance habits to agent workflows. He argues that inference speed is only part of it: with provisioning, tools and suspend and resume unchanged, he says halving inference time takes about 20% off a task, a figure he labels rough. His ranking of fixes puts thinking budgets first: "Check thinking budgets! This is overwhelmingly the lowest hanging fruit." A fast-tier model at maximum thinking, he writes, can be much slower than a slower tier at low or medium thinking.

Other points are practical. A for loop with sleep in an agent's trace is a red flag that it is polling for something that should notify it. Agents chaining xargs -I{} over many files can start hundreds of thousands of processes. Shell startup files such as .bashrc matter when an agent starts a new shell per command, and broken IPv6 in sandboxes adds delay to each request. The post is experience, not measurement, and gives no benchmarks.

Why it matters: Before paying for a faster tier or a new provider, read your agent's tool-call traces and your thinking settings. They are cheaper to fix and, by this author's account, often the larger share of the wait.