The pattern is always pretty much the same: smaller stories are less token-efficient
yfontana on Hacker News
factor of 1 to 3 between my smallest and largest stories
In the thread “The Components of Agent Memory”, replying to this comment
Helped: Planning larger work as epics and stories for tracking.
… Neither "story size" nor "AI work" have fully obvious metrics, so I looked at a variety of things, like length of story plan, number of lines of codes written for the story, number of different files read/written (and for AI work: number of tool calls, number of tokens for main thread / implementer / reviewer subagents, etc.). The pattern is always pretty much the same: smaller stories are less token-efficient. One major factor for this is that in bigger stories, the average number of lines of code written per tool call is significantly higher (and not just a little bit, if I remember correctly it's a factor of 1 to 3 between my smallest and largest stories). …