A 311 platform's operations team notices that its Agents CLI-managed coding-agent deployment is running well over its monthly budget, even though the agent keeps completing its assigned tasks correctly. What should the team do with Agents CLI to bring cost back in line without reducing what the agent is able to accomplish?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of tool calls like taxi rides the agent expenses to you: every ride costs something, and a chunk of them never actually get the agent anywhere useful. Agents CLI lets the team pull up the trip log and cancel the rides that go nowhere, instead of just switching to a cheaper cab for every trip. That's how you cut cost without touching what the agent is capable of doing.
Full Explanation
Agents CLI's governance and optimization tooling exposes what a deployed agent is actually doing at runtime, including which tools it calls, how often, and whether those calls contribute to a finished task. Cost overruns on a coding-agent deployment are frequently driven by redundant or low-value tool invocations rather than by the model itself, so the fix that targets the real driver is auditing the tool-invocation history and disabling or rerouting calls that don't move work forward.
Shortening system instructions is a prompt-configuration lever that belongs to low-code tooling, not a way to change a coding agent's runtime tool-execution pattern. Turning off trace logging removes the very telemetry needed to diagnose the overrun, trading a visible symptom for blindness. Swapping in a smaller model addresses model-serving cost, a different lever entirely, and can quietly degrade output quality while leaving the wasteful tool calls untouched.
Scope note: this diagnosis applies to an agent already in production generating a billable trail, not to pre-deployment sizing decisions. Operational check: pull one representative week of the agent's tool-invocation log and flag any tool called on nearly every turn regardless of whether its output is actually used downstream.