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Posted by systima 11 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.

510 points | 284 commentspage 7
siddhxrth 10 hours ago|
[flagged]
systima 10 hours ago||
We have never read your blog or your content before.

Suspect that many have covered the "Comparing agentic coding tools" angle before, and that the differentiator is depth of analysis + conclusions.

anamexis 10 hours ago|||
Do you think you were the first person to write a blog post about coding harness token usage?
nish__ 10 hours ago||
Intellectual property is a dead concept.
kotberg 8 hours ago||
[flagged]
Cider9986 9 hours ago|
Grok 4.5 is really fast, has more usage at $10/month than $20/month Claude pro, and Opus-level. Claude pro feels like a demo.

Claude is much better in OpenCode then in Claude Code, OpenCode is just better than Claude Code. Claude Code feels like a complete mess to use comparatively.

int_19h 6 hours ago|
Elon saying that it is "Opus level" doesn't actually make it so.
simondotau 45 minutes ago|||
True of anything anyone say about anything ever, including int_19h.

I'm quite impressed with Grok 4.5 because its speed and single-task effectiveness feels better than anything else for a human-in-the-loop workflow. (For the stuff I do, I'm not interested in having AI race ahead of what I can oversee.)

All models do things in a way I personally disagree with at least some of the time. The "dumber" models sometimes fail to recognise how to fit a solution into existing code. The "smarter" models sometimes get too clever and over-engineer their solutions. Cleverness is occasionally interesting, but is just as likely to trigger a distracting rabbit hole where I spend time analysing whether something unexpected was a legit insight, or mere opinion.

Cider9986 5 hours ago|||
I've compared them, have you?