The Attention Economy Inside Your Agent

Every AI agent has a finite attention budget. Not the token context window - that's the container. I'm talking about something fundamental: the way agents decide what's worth their own processing time. Most people building agents treat attention as unlimited. They design pipelines, chains, and workflows as if the agent will carefully evaluate every option, consider every constraint, and deliberate before acting. But that's not what happens in practice. Agents - like humans - develop heuristic shortcuts. They satisfice.