--- title: "Claude Code Sends 4.7x More Tokens Than OpenCode Before Reading Your Prompt" url: https://daily.dev/posts/claude-code-sends-4-7x-more-tokens-than-opencode-before-reading-your-prompt-9m02iom1z source_url: https://systima.ai/blog/claude-code-vs-opencode-token-overhead type: article source: "Hacker News" published: 2026-07-12T19:03:36.548Z updated: 2026-07-12T20:21:36.888Z tags: ["claude-code", "context-engineering", "opencode"] reading_time: 15 upvotes: 6 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Claude Code Sends 4.7x More Tokens Than OpenCode Before Reading Your Prompt **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 15 min read · 6 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A detailed empirical comparison of token consumption between Claude Code and OpenCode, measured at the API boundary using a logging proxy. Claude Code's baseline overhead is ~33,000 tokens per request vs OpenCode's ~7,000, driven by 27 tool schemas and injected scaffolding. Cache instability in Claude Code causes 5.9x–54x more cache writes than OpenCode on identical tasks. Real-world configurations (instruction files, MCP servers, subagents) can push first-request overhead to 75,000–90,000 tokens. Subagent fan-out multiplies costs dramatically: a 121k-token direct task ballooned to 513k tokens with two subagents. One counterpoint: Claude Code's parallel tool batching can make multi-step tasks cheaper than OpenCode's serial one-call-per-turn approach. The post includes methodology details, caveats, and instructions for reproducing the measurement rig. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How We Cut Our Claude Code Token Usage 2.8x\!](https://daily.dev/posts/how-we-cut-our-claude-code-token-usage-2-8x--p2fzdwf2l) · Daily Dose of Data Science \| Avi Chawla \| Substack · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code), [#context-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/context-engineering), [#opencode](https://daily.dev/tags/opencode) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/claude-code-sends-4-7x-more-tokens-than-opencode-before-reading-your-prompt-9m02iom1z)