If you price a coding agent the way you price a chatbot, you will misread the bill every time. A normal code chat turns one prompt into one completion. A coding agent runs a loop: it reads files, calls tools, reads the output, edits, re-runs the tests, and self-corrects — often a dozen turns.
Source: [Dev.to](https://dev.to/tokenlat/your-coding-agent-bills-per-task-not-per-token-40ai)