Recovery Cost
The time and tokens required to get a session back on track after a failure — State Loss, Execution Hallucination, or Plan Drift.
Recovery Cost measures the penalty for agent failures. When an agent hallucinates that a task is complete, the Recovery Cost includes: the time to discover the hallucination, the tokens spent diagnosing what actually happened, the tokens spent re-doing the work correctly, and the tokens spent getting the agent back on track. Recovery Cost is almost always higher than the original task cost — often 2-5x higher — because recovery requires understanding what went wrong before you can fix it. This makes error prevention far more valuable than error correction.
More in Measurement
Context Efficiency
Useful retained state per token consumed.
Token ROI
The measurable value produced per token consumed. The business metric for Context Efficiency.
Context Utilization Rate
The percentage of input context that the model actually uses for its output. Low rate = waste.
Recall Cost Ratio
The cost of retrieving stored context vs. the cost of re-generating it from scratch.
Waste Ratio
The proportion of tokens consumed that produce no useful output. The metric behind Token Bleed and Token Burn.
Iteration Velocity
The speed at which a human-AI pair can move from idea to tested output.
Quality-Per-Token
A measure of output quality relative to tokens consumed. Distinct from Token ROI (value) — this measures correctness, completeness, and relevance per unit of cost.