# Reducing Token Usage of State-in-Context Agents using Minification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01326/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 8 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01489/) (2024)
- [Are "Solved Issues" in SWE-bench Really Solved Correctly? An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15223/) (2025)
- [The Complexity Trap: Simple Observation Masking Is as Efficient as LLM Summarization for Agent Context Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21433/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a replication and extension of the recently introduced state-in-context agent framework. We independently re-implement the DirectSolve variant and evaluate it on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark. We report end-to-end full-benchmark results using GPT-5-mini and run selected ablations with GPT-4.1. In addition, we investigate a complementary research question: What is the impact of token-reducing input transformation strategies on the performance of software engineering agents? Based on a preliminary prompt analysis, we identify source code as the dominant contributor to token consumption. We therefore apply a series of code minification techniques that remove or shorten non-essential lexical elements while preserving program semantics. The proposed transformations are integrated into the agent and systematically evaluated. Experiments show that minification reduces average input token usage by 42% with a 12 percentage-point drop in resolution rate. These findings demonstrate that lightweight source code transformations can yield substantial efficiency gains while retaining a substantial fraction of the baseline performance, indicating a promising path toward more cost-effective agents. The full implementation is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/ipa-lab/minified-state-in-context-agent