Study Shows Full-File AI Code Rewrites Consume 11x More Tokens Than Simple Generation

A developer burned through a 10-million-token free AI coding allowance in two days by repeatedly requesting full-file rewrites, prompting a structured investigation into token costs. Using MonkeyCode, an open-source AI coding platform offering 10 million free tokens and a free server, a reproducible benchmarking harness was built to measure real token consumption across common coding tasks. Results showed that a full-file rewrite costs roughly 3,300 tokens per run, compared to just 300 for a simple code generation task — an 11x difference. The benchmark covered five task types: code generation, debugging, test writing, refactoring, and full-file rewriting, with token estimates based on a four-characters-per-token heuristic. The findings highlight that deliberate task selection, rather than defaulting to rewrites, can stretch a 10-million-token allowance to cover tens of thousands of meaningful coding operations.