I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

Download PNG At Quesma we are researching the economics of AI agents: what agentic coding really costs and what you can do about it. For this research I am running my own deep research setup, a pipeline of agents that builds a knowledge base I can actually trust. The first version of this setup burned the whole limit of my Claude Max 5x plan in 30 minutes. This post is the story of how I fixed the cost and the trust, using only subscriptions I already pay for, and how you can build the same.