Claude Code's Hidden Token Tax: 4.7x More Before You Start

The Systima analysis from July 2026 pinned both Claude Code and OpenCode to the same model — Claude Sonnet 4.5 — and ran identical tasks on identical hardware. Before either tool reads a single word of user input, Claude Code ships roughly 32,800 tokens across the wire. OpenCode ships 6,900. That's the 4.7× headline from the Systima benchmarks reported by WebProNews. But the same run showed Claude Code finishing a multi-step write-run-test-fix loop in three model requests by batching parallel tool calls — OpenCode needed nine turns, one tool per cycle. The bigger baseline, paid fewer times, sometimes wins. Token floors are not the whole story.

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