# When Agents Slow Down: Understanding LLM Agents' Test-Time Strategies via Elo-per-token Analysis > Source: > Published: 2026-09-15 04:00:00+00:00 Large language model (LLM) agents allocate test-time compute adaptively as they revise solutions, use tools, explore alternatives, and decide when to stop. This test-time strategy makes it difficult to measure how agent performance scales. We study open-ended tasks that provide continuous scores for