I analyzed 3 weeks of my own messages to coding agents. 40% of what I typed was not real work. Is it the same for you?

I run several coding agents in parallel, mostly Claude Code and Kimi, sometimes Cursor and Copilot. I felt slow, so I exported every message I sent them over 3 weeks and had each one read and labeled by what it was for. I did not use keyword search. I tried that first and it gave wrong numbers. After removing automated traffic, 2,116 messages were really mine, about 96 a day.

What my messages were for

• 55% real work: new tasks, questions, decisions
• 13% correcting the agent: wrong thing, drifted, changed the model or scope without asking
• 9.5% "what's the progress?"
• 6% carrying info by hand from one agent or chat to another
• 4% "go", "yes", "continue" because the agent stopped to wait
• 4% "explain that in simple English"
• 3% repeating a rule I had already given
• 5% other: slash commands, fragments

So 40% of my typing is overhead.

Details

• I asked for progress 200 times. More than half came in bursts within the same hour, while I sat waiting on long runs that finish silently.
• The biggest single cause of corrections was UI work, fixed one screenshot at a time.
• The same rules came back on different days and with different agents: "don't waste tokens", "ask before changing the model", "don't release until it's verified". A rule I give one agent never reaches the others.
• On my worst day I relayed 33 times. Two agents were on the same experiment and I was pasting each one's report to the other.
• Token anxiety is constant. Agents start big runs without saying what they will cost.
• One surprise: more than half of the "user messages" in my logs were not me at all. They were scripts and test harnesses running under my normal config.

Questions

• Do you see the same problems, or is your overhead somewhere else?
• Which one costs you the most?
• Has anyone actually fixed the progress polling or the rules-don't-carry-over problem, especially across different tools?