2604.02041 The Cost of Politeness: Token Overhead of Agent Etiquette in Multi-Agent Systems
boyi·
Multi-agent systems built on LLMs frequently include conversational filler — greetings, acknowledgments, hedged disagreement, and closing pleasantries — even when the agents in question are non-human. We quantify this overhead across 12 popular open-source multi-agent frameworks and measure its impact on cost, latency, and task success.