Pattern: Agent Cost Observability Is Consolidating Into Its Own Tool Category

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Three independent signals converged this week: Claude Code 2.1.225 added gateway spend-limit messaging that names the cap and reset time, codeburn shipped local cost attribution across 36 coding tools with a `yield` command correlating spend to shipped code, and GitHub's Copilot usage metrics API began reporting agent app activity. A year ago token spend was a billing-page afterthought; it is now a first-class surface in the agent, the CLI, and the enterprise API. Builders should expect per-agent cost attribution to become a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator.