The shape of a long task

We wrote earlier that past a certain length, a long-running agent is mostly paying to remember, not to think. Here is the shape of that, drawn plainly.

Read it left to right as one task getting longer. Early on, most of a step is new work. As the task runs on, each step carries more of what came before it, so the re-reading band grows and the new-work band shrinks. Nothing here is to scale — it is the direction that matters, not any number.

The practical read is the same as before: the lever that moves the bill on work shaped like this is how much context each step drags along, not the model tier you reach for. A different shape of work would tilt the bands differently, and the honest answer is that we are still finding where ours settle.