AI ENGINEERING
27 October 2026 · 11 MIN READ
30 Failed Attempts and $21.87: The Output Cap of My Agent Factory Was Counting the Model's Thinking
At its identity step my agent build factory asks the model for three homepage mockups per site. For one site, five launches in a day produced 30 failed attempts, ten minutes of waiting each and $21.87 of model spend for nothing, while another site got its mockups the same afternoon. The cause was one number set months ago: a 32,000-token cap on each answer, on a model that now reasons before it writes, and whose reasoning counts against that cap. Here is how I found it, the per-model cap that fixed it, the replay that proved it before the merge, and the second defect the same morning exposed: an e-mail the page promised and nothing sent.
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