Agent expenditure
Skill athola/claude-night-market/plugins/conserve/skills/agent-expenditure
23 Claude Code plugins: TDD enforcement hooks, git/PR workflows, spec-driven development, code review, project lifecycle, fix-from-error, maintenance automation, context optimization, research, and multi-LLM delegation. 186 skills, 128 commands, 54 agents.
npx -y skills add athola/claude-night-market --skill agent-expenditureAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
What its author says it does
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Tracks per-agent token usage and flags waste in parallel dispatch. Use when evaluating parallel agent efficiency or after a multi-agent run.
SKILL.md
2.7 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Agent Token Waste Monitoring
When To Use
- After parallel agent dispatch completes
- When evaluating whether to increase agent count
- During retrospectives on agent-heavy workflows
- When plan-before-large-dispatch rule triggers
When NOT To Use
- Single-agent workflows (no coordination overhead)
- During active agent execution (post-hoc analysis)
- For token budgeting (use token-conservation instead)
Brooks's Law for Agents
Dispatching more agents does not always help. Coordination overhead grows with agent count:
| Agent Count | Expected Overhead | Guidance |
|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | Negligible | Dispatch freely |
| 4-5 | 10-15% | Acceptable; plan first |
| 6-8 | 20-30% | Monitor closely |
| 9+ | 30%+ | Likely counterproductive |
Coordination overhead is measured as shared-file conflicts: concurrent Read/Write operations on the same file by different agents, as a percentage of total agent runtime.
Post-Dispatch Review Checklist
After parallel agent runs, evaluate:
- Did each agent produce unique findings?
- Was total token expenditure proportional to value?
- Did any agent duplicate another's work?
- Would fewer agents have produced the same result?
If 2+ questions answer no, reduce agent count in future dispatches of the same type.
Waste Signals
See modules/waste-signals.md for the 5 waste signal categories and
detection criteria.
Cross-References
.claude/rules/plan-before-large-dispatch.mdfor the 4+ agent planning requirementconserve:token-conservationfor session-level token budgetingconjure:agent-teamsfor dispatch coordination
Exit Criteria
- All 4 post-dispatch review questions answered with explicit yes/no per agent (unique findings, proportional expenditure, no duplication, fewer agents sufficient)
- Waste signals from
modules/waste-signals.mdchecked against the completed run; any triggered signal named with the category - A recommendation is produced: either "reduce agent count to N" or "dispatch was efficient" with coordination overhead percentage
- If 2+ review questions answer no, a concrete agent-count reduction is stated for future dispatches of the same type