More with Less: An Empirical Study of Turn-Control Strategies for Efficient Coding Agents

LLM-powered coding agents, which operate in iterative loops (turns) to solve software engineering tasks, are becoming increasingly powerful. However, their practical deployment is hindered by significant and unpredictable costs. This challenge arises from a combination of factors: quadratically growing token counts with each turn, the high price of state-of-the-art models, the large number of turns required for real-world tasks, and the tendency of agents to take inefficient or unnecessary actions. While existing research focuses on optimizing individual turns, the strategic control of the total number of turns remains an underexplored area for managing agent performance and cost. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on the SWE-bench benchmark using three state-of-the-art models (Claude 4 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT 4.1). We systematically evaluate the impact of three distinct turn-control strategies: an unrestricted baseline, a fixed-turn limit with reminders, and a novel dynamic-turn strategy that grants extensions on-demand. Our findings first reveal a fundamental trade-off in the unrestricted setting, where no single model excels across performance, cost, and turn efficiency. We then show that a fixed-turn limit, specifically at the 75th percentile of the baseline, serves as a "sweet spot", substantially reducing costs (by 24%-68%) with minimal impact on solve rates. Most significantly, our proposed dynamic-turn strategy consistently outperforms fixed-limit approaches, achieving comparable or better solve rates while further reducing costs by an additional 12%-24% by intelligently allocating resources only to tasks that need them. This work provides the first systematic analysis of turncontrol strategies, offering simple yet effective guidelines for developers to balance cost and efficacy. We demonstrate that dynamic resource allocation is a superior, easy-to-implement approach for deploying powerful yet economically viable coding agents.

• Software and its engineering → Software verification and validation.