Systima study finds Claude Code sends 33,000 tokens overhead before reading user prompt
According to Systima's empirical analysis, Claude Code sends 33,000 tokens of overhead before processing the user prompt, compared to OpenCode's 7,000 tokens, causing usage meters to spike substantially faster despite identical code generation output. The overhead multiplier affects per-token billing and weekly usage limit consumption across Claude Code implementations in CLI, IDE extensions, and web interfaces.
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