Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
7.9 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth 8
novelty 9
actionability 7
community 8
strategic 6
personal 9
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Direct comparison of AI coding tool token usage, highly actionable for developers.
Summary
Claude Code consumes 33,000 tokens of system prompt and scaffolding before the user's prompt, versus OpenCode's 7,000, and writes up to 54x more cache tokens per task due to inefficient caching. A 72KB AGENTS.md adds ~20,000 tokens per request, and five MCP servers add 5,000–7,000 more, pushing real-world baselines to 75,000–85,000 tokens. While Claude Code's batching can reduce total tokens on multi-step tasks (e.g., 121k vs 513k with subagents), the advantage is model-dependent: on a newer model, the same task cost 298k tokens versus OpenCode's 133k.