The Stochastic Tax: Why Your AI Agent Is a Financial Liability (And How to Fix It)

Production AI agents waste 35-45% of inference budgets on architectural failures such as re-summarization loops, tool call amnesia, infinite retries, and hallucinated tool calls—collectively termed the 'Stochastic Tax.' The fix involves tiered model routing (using smaller models for classification/routing instead of frontier models), deterministic exit points to prevent infinite loops, and contextual snapshots to eliminate redundant context rebuilding.