Qwen tokenizes 330 lines of HTML/JS into 1,609 tokens; Gemma needs 4,258 for the same file.

An r/LocalLLaMA post (215 upvotes) ran identical inputs through Qwen 35B-A3B and Gemma 26B-A4B and found the tokenizers diverge almost entirely on code: 2.6x apart on HTML/JS, but 1,025 vs 1,039 tokens on a 55-line instruction document. Near-identical on prose. That's a near-3x difference in effective context and cost on exactly the workload where Qwen is reputed to beat Gemma, which suggests the coding-vs-language reputation gap is partly a tokenizer artifact rather than pure capability. Cheapest measurement in this newsletter: run your actual files through both tokenizers before picking a base model.