Capability–cost frontier

The Pareto frontier of model or agent quality against dollar-and-latency cost, used to pick the cheapest configuration that still clears a task's quality bar rather than defaulting to the most capable one.

grounded in: Trend theme 'Agent token-efficiency scrutiny: developers now benchmarking coding agents on overhead and cost, not just capability' plus the notable 'GPT-5.6 agent migration got 2.2x faster and 27% che