Krentsel: Exo autonomously re-architected its Discord adapter, cutting costs by 96%
Alex Krentsel · Exo: Harnesses should see their own code and logs — Alex Krentsel, UC Berekeley / Google Research · Aug 15, 2026 · at 39:44
Alex Krentsel, co-creator of Exo, describes an experiment where the self-improving agent framework modified its own code to optimize Discord LLM context and cost.
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“We asked it, Hey, I noticed, I asked, Hey, but how much did the last message cost in the discord adapter? And it was like, it was. It's like, are you serious? 16 cents. That's actually crazy. Like. Go work on driving that down. And so it went and re-architected its own Discord adapter, got runtime, made changes, observed them, tested them to really scope down the context that was included in each of the LM calls as they were built by scoping it to certain conversations and certain threads only, rather than pulling messages from across different threads in, in Discord in a way that drove down the cost to, I think like, it was like a 96 decrease, a 96% decrease. And by the way, we committed this back. Afterwards. So the changes it made improved itself, decreased its cost, and then we ended up committing that to the actual code that's there now.”
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