Claude Code Is Way More Token-Hungry Than OpenCode. We Measured Exactly How Much
TLDR Dev
Researchers measured token consumption of Claude Code and OpenCode on identical tasks and found Claude Code uses approximately 33,000 tokens for system prompts and tooling before the user's actual prompt, compared to OpenCode's 7,000 tokens. Claude Code also wrote cache tokens at up to 54 times the rate of OpenCode, with real production setups using 75,000-85,000 tokens before any user input, and subagent delegation multiplying costs further. The difference narrowed on newer models and when Claude Code batched multiple tool calls efficiently, but Claude Code's larger baseline overhead remains a significant factor in production agentic AI systems.
Why it matters
Claude Code has been found to consume more tokens and have less cache efficiency compared to OpenCode when performing the same tasks, with Claude Code sending 33k tokens before reading the prompt while OpenCode sends 7k.
