Yes, two ways failing to combine tool calls is a real deficiency for the LLM's user: it costs money and can get you rate limited.

Every turn forces you to pay $ for cached inputs and possibly gets you rate limited on TPM. At 500k context and $0.26/M-tok cache read price, every time it combines two tool calls instead of taking separate turns would save you $0.13. That could add up.

Maybe the provider sets a rate limit of 2 million TPM. That's just 4 turns in 1 minute before you start getting 429s. Cutting them in half by combining calls can save that.

All else equal, we definitely want models combining tool calls!

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