Agentic AI’s Token Debt: Why Multi-Step Tool Chains Blow Up Your Context Window And How Semantic Distillation Fixes the O(N ) Problem

The Cost Problem Nobody Warned You About Agentic AI is the hottest architectural pattern of 2026. Frameworks like LangChain, AutoGen, and CrewAI let LLM agents orchestrate multi-step workflows — calling APIs, querying databases, executing code, and chaining tool outputs to solve complex tasks. I’ve been building data integration pipelines for 18 years, so when agentic workflows started connecting to the same enterprise systems I manage, I paid attention. What I found was a compounding cost pro...