Cost control
5 engineering articles on cost control from building and running Swarm 357 in production.
Cost control15 June 2026
OpenRouter and cheap models for swarm tests
Point the runtime at OpenRouter, use a cheap tool-capable model for the iteration loop, and keep premium models for baselines. Including why free models break tool calling.
Cost control8 June 2026
Four token budgeting patterns for multi-agent systems
Reserve before the call, budget by layer not by run, degrade loudly, and cap the context you load. The patterns that keep parallel agents inside a number you chose.
Evals28 April 2026
How to actually evaluate an agent swarm
Single-agent and swarm metrics measure different systems and must be reported separately. A working eval methodology with budget caps, baselines in version control, and the numbers that lie.
Cost control10 February 2026
Cost control for LLM agent fleets
Layer budgets, an atomic ledger, and a logged model downgrade at 80 percent. The FinOps primitives that keep a multi-agent run from turning into a surprise invoice.
Orchestration13 January 2026
Multi-agent orchestration without the headcount fantasy
357 roles is an org chart for agents, not 357 models running at once. Here is how role catalogs, layer routing, and hard agent caps keep a multi-agent system solvent.