AI coding agents fail in predictable ways: they loop, stall, and burn tokens while making no progress. Karpathy's observation holds up in practice: a single well-scoped context file (a CLAUDE.md) plus tight run budgets fixes most of it. Estimate your spend, visualize the run, and unstick the agent below. All numbers here are estimates, not real billing.
Token Spend Calculator
$0.00Estimated total cost
$0.00Cost of retries
0mEstimated wall time
Estimates assume uniform steps. Real billing varies with caching, tool calls, and context growth. Always confirm against your provider's usage dashboard.
Burn Rate and Run Timeline
Cumulative costRetry steps
Simulated Run Timeline
ProductiveRetry loopStall
Stuck-Agent Checklist
Match the failure pattern you see in the timeline to a corrective prompt. Copy it straight into the agent session.