1 of 52

Where did all your tokens go?

Annie Freeman

Developer Advocate, Coralogix

2 of 52

3 of 52

"This feels faster." "That seems better."

4 of 52

"This feels faster." "That seems better."

Vibes

5 of 52

Measure coding agent impact using OpenTelemetry to improve efficiency

6 of 52

Hello, I’m Annie

Developer Advocate at Coralogix

Platform Engineer at Xero

Trained as a lawyer in New Zealand

7 of 52

8 of 52

1

2

3

4

Coding agent usage today

Coding Agent Instrumentation with OTel

My experiment

Takeaways

9 of 52

03 / 27

10 of 52

04 / 27

11 of 52

04 / 27

12 of 52

Every token is energy…

13 of 52

https://simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/

14 of 52

Every token is energy…

​

… and the creation of software now contributes to that energy usage

15 of 52

Coding agent instrumentation with OpenTelemetry

16 of 52

17 of 52

The data your agent is already emitting

18 of 52

You instrument nothing.

19 of 52

Easy set up

20 of 52

21 of 52

THE EXPERIMENT

22 of 52

23 of 52

24 of 52

Default open stance

25 of 52

Default open stance

26 of 52

27 of 52

TDD

28 of 52

29 of 52

Skip permissions

30 of 52

THE RESULTS

31 of 52

32 of 52

33 of 52

34 of 52

Where did this money go?

35 of 52

Caching in code agents

36 of 52

37 of 52

38 of 52

But why?

39 of 52

40 of 52

41 of 52

42 of 52

43 of 52

It’s not just me

44 of 52

We then analysed across

21,329

sessions.

45 of 52

AND ALMOST NO ONE IS LOOKING

52%

name missing metrics as their single biggest challenge with AI.

Only 29% measure impact at all, and mostly on sentiment.

LeadDev · State of AI-Driven Software Releases 2026

coralogix

08 / 27

46 of 52

ONE MODEL FOR EVERYTHING AFTER THIS

cost = context × turns × model rate

Three multiplicative levers. And it's the energy model too, because those same three things drive the compute.

coralogix

11 / 27

47 of 52

48 of 52

49 of 52

50 of 52

Four levers to be more token efficient

51 of 52

1

2

3

4

Code creation contributes to energy usage, so we also need to think about efficiency here

It’s super easy to set up telemetry collection!

The cache hit rate is a key lever that impacts token usage

You can connect this data to DORA metrics to decide what approaches work best for you

KEY TAKEAWAYS

52 of 52

04 / 27

Let’s connect

52

52

Annie Freeman