AI Coding Token and Cost Analysis: What exactly is consumed by a task

Core Issues

Claude Code or Codex Where does the cost of completing a task come from? Why does the number of Tokens not directly represent the value of work?

Article structure

1. Input, cache, output and tool call costs
2. Context expansion, retry and invalid exploration
3. From session cost to task cost attribution
4. Trade-off between quality, speed and cost
5. What should be recorded on the team cost dashboard

Completion criteria

Readers can analyze the cost structure of a real task and find room for optimization without sacrificing quality.