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Posted by systima 9 hours ago

Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k(systima.ai)
This started based off of a hunch. We usually use OpenCode, but were 'forced' to use Claude Code for a while due to issues with Meridian. In that time, we saw the usage meter rise much, much more quickly than when using OpenCode.

This was the initial anecdotal evidence, but we undertook this small study to collect empirical data:

We added logging between the agentic coding tool (Claude Code and OpenCode) and Anthropic's endpoint, and captured all requests (and the returned usage blocks).

With one caveat (toward the end of the post) we found unambiguously that Claude Code was far more inefficient in terms of its cache strategy and its harness token usage than OpenCode.

470 points | 266 commentspage 5
piokoch 8 hours ago|
No surprise, I've noticed that "agents", not only CC (I am using Copilot) are trying to be "clever", searching for a lot of data. This is good for LLM providers as this eats a lot of tokens.
arcanemachiner 8 hours ago|
OpenAI, to their credit, seems to be focusing pretty heavily on token efficiency in GPT 5.5 and beyond.
guywithahat 5 hours ago||
We've started using claude code at work and I don't understand the hype. I've been using codex and grok build at home, and they're both faster and in some cases better. Claude has a tendency to do too much. If I don't ask for unit tests and they're not in my agents.md file, then I probably don't want them. It'll try to make new libraries and classes for things that should just be a new function or a comparison check.

In our case the alternative was nothing so I'm happy to have it, but currently claude is not as competitive as I'd have maybe expected given the hype

token_roast 8 hours ago||
Why don't people fix their costs (rent a gpu) and just write their own harness (about 200 lines of code).

Supposed to be hacker news and half the posts are like "this harness steals this" like it cant be avoided.

These API costs are mad.

echelon 8 hours ago|
GLM isn't good enough yet.

It pays to be marginally ahead of people stuck on open models.

rvba 7 hours ago||
Sorry for asking here, but nobody seems to know.

If I self host a local model is there some way to make Android studio not time out after 10 minutes?

MariusGjerd 6 hours ago||
not even surprised
delduca 4 hours ago||
Imagine pi.dev…
slopinthebag 8 hours ago||
Anthropic wants to produce the best coding agent possible and doesn’t care (is even incentivized) about high costs. Other harnesses have to make trade offs between performance and cost.
goda90 8 hours ago||
Given they're incentivized to increase token use, what guarantees that higher token use improves the effectiveness of the agent and isn't just artificial padding?
slopinthebag 8 hours ago||
Well, nothing really. But I assume there can be some benefits to modifying context. For example, updating file contents or marking them as modified, summarization, injecting additional information, removing irrelevant tool call results, etc.
bpye 8 hours ago||
Is there evidence that it is actually a better agent though?
slopinthebag 8 hours ago||
There’s evidence it’s a worse agent actually. I’m just saying in theory.
MallocVoidstar 8 hours ago||
> Claude Code 2.1.207 and OpenCode 1.17.18, both pinned to claude-sonnet-4-5

So not only is this article AI-written, but the testing was entirely done by AI, too? I can't see any other reason to use such an old model.

> Our traffic passes through a local LLM gateway that wraps requests in its own envelope, a constant we measured at roughly 6,200 tokens with bare calibration requests

Why do you need to do calibration requests to figure out how your own gateway is affecting requests?

> Its subagent lane did not complete cleanly through our gateway

> We attempted to toggle extended thinking in both harnesses and are declining to publish numbers. Our gateway applies its own thinking policy, neither harness's toggle demonstrably survived the path, and anything we quoted would be noise.

Why is your own gateway screwing with your testing?

systima 8 hours ago|
Model:

Cost, mainly. The runs went through a Claude Max subscription rather than metered API billing, and pinning an older stable snapshot kept run-to-run comparisons clean and cheap. The fixed harness payload (system prompt plus tool schemas), so the headline numbers shouldn't change too much.

That said, happy to re-run the matrix on Fable and publish the diff; payload figures should barely move, tool-calling behaviour might.

Gateway:

Meridian (github.com/rynfar/meridian); proxy that bridges the Claude Code SDK to a standard Anthropic endpoint so a Claude Max subscription can drive OpenCode-et-al.

It's the auth route for all agent traffic on the machine, not something built for the benchmark.

nubg 8 hours ago||
So? it doesnt matter, after the first turn it's cached. We are probably talking about single digit cents.
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