OpenHands Achieves Higher Token Efficiency
atomic_chat_hq · x · 2026-07-18
Using the same Qwen3.5 35B model, the author tasked both OpenHands and Codex with building an 8-bit Space Invaders game in 3 iterations (build, fix, polish).
Results show OpenHands consumed only 219K tokens, while Codex used 513K tokens, making OpenHands 2.3× more token-efficient. The key difference lies in context handling: OpenHands reuses unchanged data and only charges for new content, whereas Codex repeatedly sends and charges for the full context in every iteration. While OpenHands runs slightly slower, minimizing token costs is more critical for local execution.
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