Somebody put a logging proxy between two coding agents and the model, asked each of them to reply with the single word "OK," and watched what went over the wire. Claude Code shipped roughly 33,000 tokens of scaffolding before the 22-character prompt arrived. OpenCode shipped about 7,000. The Systima writeup has the full teardown, and the number is doing exactly what a good gotcha number does: making everyone feel smart for using the leaner tool.
Resist that. The interesting question isn't "why is Claude Code so bloated." It's "what does that context buy, and is it worth the price for your task." Because a 33k preamble isn't waste by definition. It's a wager: that spending tokens up front on capability makes the model better enough, per turn, to earn them back. OpenCode is refusing that wager. Whether refusing is smart depends entirely on the game you're playing.
Where the tokens actually go
First, kill the idea that this is all fluffy system-prompt prose. It isn't. Per the source's payload capture on Sonnet 4.5:
Claude Code's system prompt: ~27,000 characters across three blocks.
