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Claude Code's much higher token usage compared to Codex comes from its harness re-feeding a large accumulated context history into the model at each turn, not from generating longer outputs.

Investigating why Claude Code burns far more tokens than Codex or Qwen-Code, Raschka found the difference is almost entirely on the input side—one run used 578k input tokens versus just 4.5k output tokens—suggesting Claude's harness re-accumulates prior context every turn. ✦ AI generated

Sebastian Raschka · Ahead of AI · 2026-06-27 · original ↗

The logs suggest that Claude is repeatedly feeding more context back into the model across turns, including previous messages, tool calls, command outputs, and file contents. For example, one Claude run used about 578k input tokens but only about 4.5k output tokens across 25 turns.

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