Benchmark Shows Leaner Tool Catalogue Cut AI Coding Agent Costs by 40 Percent

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A developer at Locally Uncensored ran a controlled benchmark comparing their in-house coding agent against the open-source tool opencode on an identical bugfix task using the same model, API endpoint, and per-token pricing. Across three runs, opencode averaged 2,157 credits while Locally Uncensored version 2.6.6 completed the same task for 1,298 credits, roughly 40 percent less. Notably, opencode used fewer API requests — eight to eleven versus sixteen — yet still incurred a higher bill due to significantly larger prompt token volumes per request. The cost gap traced back to two factors: opencode's tool catalogue was nearly three times larger at 21,188 bytes versus 7,703 bytes, adding fixed overhead to every request, and accumulated context from earlier steps was not trimmed. The team's own previous release, version 2.6.5, was the most expensive agent in the test at 4,395 credits, underscoring that the efficiency gain came from a targeted optimisation pass rather than a favourable experimental setup.

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