A coding agent burns through tokens. The monthly bill from a frontier API provider for a single moderately active agent lands somewhere between fifty and a few hundred dollars, and the natural reaction is to check whether a one-time hardware purchase would be cheaper. The naive comparison — dollars per million tokens versus dollars amortized over five years — almost always concludes that local wins. The honest comparison rarely does, at least for coding workloads, at least as of mid-2026. The reason is a capability gap that doesn’t show up in any cost spreadsheet.

An agent fleet wired to a high-volume trigger source — channel mentions, queue events, webhooks — pays full cost on every cycle, even when the trigger is noise. A classifier placed in front of the main agent decides which triggers deserve a real cycle and which to drop. The pattern is old; what is new is that local LLMs make the classifier cost effectively zero, which flips the arithmetic in the pattern’s favor for cases that previously didn’t justify the latency.