I gave my AI agent a 2MB PDF. Here's what happened to my token count.

Every token your agent spends on file I/O is wasted reasoning capacity. I was building a document processing agent - the kind that reads incoming research reports, extracts key findings, and produces executive briefings. Nothing exotic. The kind of workflow thousands of teams are automating right now. The PDF I was testing with was 2MB. Dense text. A typical industry research report. When I measured the token cost of processing it inline, the number was 97,354 input tokens - just to get the text into Claude's context. At claude-sonnet-4-6 pricing, that's $0.29 per document.