"shouldn't the Agent have succeeded way faster/efficiently instead of using "4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens."" No. Have you seen

"shouldn't the Agent have succeeded way faster/efficiently instead of using "4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens."" No. Have you seen LLM output? The fact that it managed to converge at all in the problem space is amazing, an LLM is a 'book', the context window is the page number, the page has a token, that's it, that this huge book of weights already contains a method to search a problem space at all and actually go down a 'good' path eventually is remarkable, but it's going to be incredibly inefficient at doing so, a book doesn't have any kind of real-time model building like a brain.