Token Cost Is the Real Bottleneck in Agentic AI: An Empirical Test of Agent Memory Strategies Leaderboards Ignore What Actually Breaks in Production Academic and open-source agent benchmarks care almost exclusively about accuracy and completion rates. Leaderboards measure how well you answer, not how long your agent runs before context blows up or costs explode. This misleads applied teams. In practice, token costs, context window overruns, and ballooning prompt sizes outpace ac...