OpenCode was the first open source agent I used, and my main workhorse after experimenting briefly with Claude Code and realizing the potential of agentic coding. Due to that, and because it's a popular an open source alternative, I want to be able to recommend it and be enthusiastic about it. The problem for me is that the development practices of the people that are working on it are suboptimal at best; they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things (or even build a proper list of changes for each release), and they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace.
More than that, it's an extremely large and complex TypeScript code base — probably larger and more complex than it needs to be — and (partly as a result) it's fairly resource inefficient (often uses 1GB of RAM or more. For a TUI).
On top of that, at least I personally find the TUI to be overbearing and a little bit buggy, and the agent to be so full of features that I don't really need — also mildly buggy — that it sort of becomes hard to use and remember how everything is supposed to work and interact.
I am more concerned about their, umm, gallant approach to security. Not only that OpenCode is permissive by default in what it is allowed to do, but that it apparently tries to pull its config from the web (provider-based URL) by default [1]. There is also this open GitHub issue [2], which I find quite concerning (worst case, it's an RCE vulnerability).
It also sends all of your prompts to Grok's free tier by default, and the free tier trains on your submitted information, X AI can do whatever they want with that, including building ad profiles, etc.
You need to set an explicit "small model" in OpenCode to disable that.
This. I work on projects that warrant a self hosted model to ensure nothing is leaked to the cloud. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that even though the only configured model is local, all my prompts are sent to the cloud to... generate a session title. Fortunately caught during testing phase.
I’ve been testing opencode and it feels TUI in appearance only. I prefer commandline and TUIs and in my mind TUI idea is to be low level, extremely portable interface and to get out of the way. Opencode does not have low color, standard terminal theme so had to switch to a proper terminal program. Copy paste is hijacked so I need to write code out to file in order to get a snippet. The enter key (as in the return by the keypad) does not work for sending a line. I have not tested but don’t think this would work over SSH even. I have been googling around to find if I am holding it wrong but it feels to break expectations of a terminal app in a way that I wish they would have made it a gui. Makes me sad because I think the goods are there and it’s otherwise good.
> The problem for me is that the development practices of the people that are working on it are suboptimal at best; they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things (or even build a proper list of changes for each release), and they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace.
this is what i notice with openclaw as well. there have been releases where they break production features. unfortunately this is what happens when code becomes a commidity, everyone thinks that shipping fast is the moat but at the expense of suboptimality since they know a fix can be implemented quickly on the next release.
Openclaw has 20k commits, almost 700k lines of code, and it is only four months old. I feel confident that that sort of code base would have a no coherent architecture at all, and also that no human has a good mental model of how the various subsystems interact.
I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot from these early days of agentic coding.
> I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot from these early days of agentic coding.
So far what I am learning (from watching all of this) is that our constant claims that quality and security matter seem to not be true on average. Depressingly.
> So far what I am learning (from watching all of this) is that our constant claims that quality and security matter seem to not be true on average.
Only for the non-pro users. After all, those users were happy to use excel to write the programs.
What we're seeing now is that more and more developers find they are happy with even less determinism than the Excel process.
Maybe they're right; maybe software doesn't need any coherence, stability, security or even correctness. Maybe the class of software they produce doesn't need those things.
I think what we're seeing is a phase transition. In the early days of any paradigm shift, velocity trumps stability because the market rewards first movers.
But as agents move from prototypes to production, the calculus changes. Production systems need:
- Memory continuity across sessions
- Predictable behavior across updates
- Security boundaries that don't leak
The tools that prioritize these will win the enterprise market. The ones that don't will stay in the prototype/hobbyist space.
We're still in the "move fast" phase, but the "break things" part is starting to hurt real users. The pendulum will swing back.
It's understandable and even desirable that a new piece of code rapidly evolves as they iterate and fix bugs. I'd only be concerned if they keep this pattern for too long. In the early phases, I like keeping up with all the cutting edge developments. Projects where dev get afraid to ship because of breaking things end up becoming bloated with unnecessary backward compatibility.
We're still in the very early days of generative AI, and people and markets are already prioritizing quality over quantity. Quantity is irrelevant when it comes value.
All code is not fungible, "irreverent code that kinda looks okay at first glance" might be a commodity, but well-tested, well-designed and well-understood code is what's valuable.
Claude Code breaks production features and doesn't say anything about it. The product has just shifted gears with little to no ceremony.
I expect that from something guiding the market, but there have been times where stuff changes, and it isn't even clear if it is a bug or a permanent decision. I suspect they don't even know.
I'm still trying to figure out how "open" it really is; There are reports that it phones home a lot[0], and there is even a fork that claims to remove this behavior[1]:
I think there’s a conflict between “open” as in “open source”, and “open” as in “open about the practice” paired with the fact we usually don’t review software’s source scrupulously enough to spot unwanted behaviors”.
so how is telemetry not open? If you don't like telemetry for dogmatic reasons then don't use it. Find the alternative magical product whose dev team is able to improve the software blindfolded
> Find the alternative magical product whose dev team is able to improve the software blindfolded
The choice isn't "telemetry or you're blindfolded", the other options include actually interacting with your userbase. Surveys exist, interviews exist, focus groups exist, fostering communities that you can engage is a thing, etc.
For example, I was recruited and paid $500 to spend an hour on a panel discussing what developers want out of platforms like DigitalOcean, what we don't like, where our pain points are. I put the dollar amount there only to emphasize how valuable such information is from one user. You don't get that kind of information from telemetry.
> Surveys exist, interviews exist, focus groups exist, fostering communities that you can engage is a thing, etc.
We all know it’s extremely, extremely hard to interact with your userbase.
> For example I was paid $500 an hour
+the time to find volunteers doubled that, so for $1000 an hour x 10 user interviews, a free software can have feedback from 0.001% of their users. I dislike telemetry, but it’s a lie to say it’s optional.
—a company with no telemetry on neither of our downloadable or cloud product.
OpenCode's creator acknowledged that the ease of shipping has let them ship prototype features that probably weren't worth shipping and that they need to invest more time cleaning up and fixing things.
Uff. This is exactly what Casey Muratori and his friend was talking about in of their more recent podcast. Features that would never get implemented because of time constraints now do thanks to LLMs and now they have a huge codebase to maintain
I recently listened to this episode from the Claude Code creator (here is the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4) and it sounded like their development process was somewhat similar - he said something like their entire codebase has 100% churn every 6 months. But I would assume they have a more professional software delivery process.
I would (incorrectly) assume that a product like this would be heavily tested via AI - why not? AI should be writing all the code, so why would the humans not invest in and require extreme levels of testing since AI is really good at that?
I mean, I'm slowly trying to learn lightweight formal methods (i.e. what stuff like Alloy or Quint do), behavior driven development, more advanced testing systems for UIs, red-green TDD, etc, which I never bothered to learn as much before, precisely because they can handle the boilerplate aspects of these things, so I can focus on specifying the core features or properties I need for the system, or thinking through the behavior, information flow, and architecture of the system, and it can translate that into machine-verifiable stuff, so that my code is more reliable! I'm very early on that path, though. It's hard!
Probably all describe problems stem from the developers using agent coding; including using TypeScript, since these tools are usually more familiar with Js/Js adjacent web development languages.
Perhaps the use of coding agents may have encouraged this behavior, but it is perfectly possible to do the opposite with agents as well — for instance, to use agents to make it easier to set up and maintain a good testing scaffold for TUI stuff, a comprehensive test suite top to bottom, in a way maintainers may not have had the time/energy/interest to do before, or to rewrite in a faster and more resource efficient language that you may find more verbose, be less familiar with, or find annoying to write — and nothing is forcing them to release as often as they are, instead of just having a high commit velocity. I've personally found AIs to be just as good at Go or Rust as TypeScript, perhaps better, as well, so I don't think there was anything forcing them to go with TypeScript. I think they're just somewhat irresponsible devs.
The value of having (and executing) a coherent product vision is extremely undervalued in FOSS, and IMO the difference between a successful project in the long-term and the kind of sploogeware that just snowballs with low-value features.
> The value of having (and executing) a coherent product vision is extremely undervalued in FOSS
Interesting you say this because I'd say the opposite is true historically, especially in the systems software community and among older folks. "Do one thing and do it well" seems to be the prevailing mindset behind many foundational tools. I think this why so many are/were irked by systemd. On the other hand newer tools that are more heavily marketed and often have some commercial angle seem to be in a perpetual state of tacking on new features in lieu of refining their raison d'etre.
I’m a little surprised by your description of constant releases and instability. That matches how I would describe Claude Code, and has been one of the main reasons I tend to use OpenCode more than Claude Code.
OpenCode has been much more stable for me in the 6 months or so that I’ve been comparing the two in earnest.
I use Droid specifically because Claude Code breaks too often for me. And then Droid broke too (but rarely), and I just stuck to not upgrading (like I don't upgrade WebStorm. Dev tools are so fragile)
Yeah every time I want to like it, scrolling is glitched vs codex and Claude. And other various things like: why is this giant model list hard coded for ollama or other local methods vs loading what I actually have...
On top of that. Open code go was a complete scam. It was not advertised as having lower quality models when I paid and glm5 was broken vs another provider, returning gibberish and very dumb on the same prompt
> they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things
Tbf, this seems exactly like Claude Code, they are releasing about one new version per day, sometimes even multiple per day. It’s a bit annoying constantly getting those messages saying to upgrade cc to the latest version
The biggest reason is I don't like being locked into an ecosystem. I can use whatever I want with OpenCode, not so much with Codex and Claude Code. Right now I'm only using GPT with it, but I like the option.
CC I have the least experience with. It just seemed buggy and unpolished to me. Codex was fine, but there was something about it that just didn't feel right. It seemed fined for code tasks but just as often I want to do research or discuss the code base, and for whatever reason I seemed to get terse less useful answers using Codex even when it's backed by the same model.
OpenCode works well, I haven't had any issues with bugs or things breaking, and it just felt comfortable to use right from the jump.
Yeah I tried using it when oh-my-opencode (now oh-my-openagent) started popping off and found it had highly unstable. I just stick with internal tooling now.
For serious coding work I use the Zed Agent; for everything else I use pi with a few skills. Overall, though, I'd recommend Pi plus a few extensions for any features you miss extremely highly. It's also TypeScript, but doesn't suffer from the other problems OC has IME. It's a beautiful little program.
Big +1 to Pi[1]. The simplicity makes it really easy to extend yourself too, so at this point I have a pretty nice little setup that's very specific to my personal workflows. The monorepo for the project also has other nice utilities like a solid agent SDK. I also use other tools like Claude Code for "serious" work, but I do find myself reaching for Pi more consistently as I've gotten more confident with my setup.
I've been building VT Code (https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode), a Rust-based semantic coding agent. Just landed Codex OAuth with PKCE exchange, credentials go into the system keyring.
I build VT Code with Tree-sitter for semantic understanding and OS-native sandboxing. It's still early but I confident it usable. I hope you'll give it a try.
Isn't this pretty much the standard across projects that make heavy use of AI code generation?
Using AI to generate all your code only really makes sense if you prioritize shipping features as fast as possible over the quality, stability and efficiency of the code, because that's the only case in which the actual act of writing code is the bottleneck.
I don't think that's true at all. As I said, in a response to another person blaming it on agentic coding above, there are a very large number of ways to use coding agents to make your programs faster, more efficient, more reliable, and more refined that also benefit from agents making the code writing research, data piping, and refactoring process quicker and less exhausting. For instance, by helping you set up testing scaffolding, handling the boilerplate around tests while you specify some example features or properties you want to test and expands them, rewriting into a more efficient language, large-scale refactors to use better data structures or architectures, or allowing you to use a more efficient or reliable language that you don't know as well or find to have too much boilerplate or compiler annoyance to otherwise deal with yourself. Then there are sort of higher level more phenomenological or subjective benefits, such as helping you focus on the system architecture and data flow, and only zoom in on particular algorithms or areas of the code base that are specifically relevant, instead of forever getting lost in the weeds of thinking about specific syntax and compiler errors or looking up a bunch of API documentation that isn't super important for the core of what you're trying to do and so on.
Personally, I find this idea that "coding isn't the bottleneck" completely preposterous. Getting all of the API documentation, the syntax, organizing and typing out all of the text, finding the correct places in the code base and understanding the code base in general, dealing with silly compiler errors and type errors, writing a ton of error handling, dealing with the inevitable and inoraticable boilerplate of programming (unless you're one of those people that believe macros are actually a good idea and would meaningfully solve this), all are a regular and substantial occurrence, even if you aren't writing thousands of lines of code a day. And you need to write code in order to be able to get a sense for the limitations of the technology you're using and the shape of the problem you're dealing with in order to then come up with and iterate on a better architecture or approach to the problem. And you need to see your program running in order to evaluate whether it's functionality and design a satisfactory and then to iterate on that. So coding is actually the upfront costs that you need to pay in order to and even start properly thinking about a problem. So being able to get a prototype out quickly is very important. Also, I find it hard to believe that you've never been in a situation where you wanted to make a simple change or refactor that would have resulted in needing to update 15 different call sites to do properly in a way that was just slightly variable enough or complex enough that editor macros or IDE refactoring capabilities wouldn't be capable of.
That's not to mention the fact that if agentic coding can make deploying faster, then it can also make deploying the same amount at the same cadence easier and more relaxing.
You're both right. AI can be used to do either fast releases or well designed code. Don't say both, as you're not making time, you're moving time between those two.
Which one you think companies prefer? Or if you're a consulting business, which one do you think your clients prefer?
> AI can be used to do either fast releases or well designed code
I have yet to actually see a single example of the latter, though. OpenCode isn't an isolated case - every project with heavy AI involvement that I've personally examined or used suffers from serious architectural issues, tons of obvious bugs and quirks, or both. And these are mostly independent open source projects, where corporate interests are (hopefully) not an influence.
I will continue to believe it's not actually possible until I am proven wrong with concrete examples. The incentives just aren't there. It's easy to say "just mindlessly follow X principle and your software will be good", where X is usually some variation of "just add more tests", "just add more agents", "just spend more time planning" etc. but I choose to believe that good software cannot be created without the involvement of someone who has a passion for writing good software - someone who wouldn't want to let an LLM do the job for them in the first place.
The team also is not breathlessly talking about how coding is dead. They have pretty sane takes on AI coding including trying to help people who care about code quality.
The security concerns raised here are valid and honestly underappreciated in the AI coding agent space broadly. The pattern of pulling config from remote URLs by default is a real footgun — it's essentially trusting arbitrary remote code in your development environment.
That said, the broader trend is interesting. We're seeing a rapid proliferation of open source coding agents (OpenCode, Aider, Continue, etc.) and each is making different tradeoffs around security, model flexibility, and UX. The ones that survive long-term will be the ones that get the security defaults right without sacrificing usability.
The resource usage point is worth noting too. 1GB+ RAM for a TUI is a symptom of the "let's rewrite everything in TypeScript/Electron" era. There's a reason obra/superpowers is trending with a shell-first approach — sometimes less abstraction is more.
The only thing I'm wondering is if they have eval frameworks (for lack of a better word). Their prompts don't seem to have changed for a while and I find greater success after testing and writing my own system prompts + modification to the harness to have the smallest most concise system prompt + dynamic prompt snippets per project.
I feel that if you want to build a coding agent / harness the first thing you should do is to build an evaluation framework to track performance for coding by having your internal metrics and task performance, instead I see most coding agents just fiddle with adding features that don't improve the core ability of a coding agent.
The Agent that is blacklisted from Anthropic AI, soon more to come.
I really like how their subagents work, as a bonus I get to choose which model is in which agent. Sadly I have to resort to the mess that Anthropic calls Claude Code
They are not blacklisted. You are allowed to use the API at commercial usage pricing. You are just not allowed to use your Claude Code subscription with OpenCode (or any other third‑party harness for the record).
If you're not paying full-fat API prices, then probably.
From what I've heard, the metrics used by Anthropic to detect unauthorized clients is pretty easy to sidestep if you look at the existing solutions out there. Better than getting your account banned.
With Anthropic, you either pay per token with an API key (expensive), or use their subscription, but only with the tools that they provide you - Claude, Claude Cowork and Claude Code (both GUI and CLI variants). Individuals generally get to use the subscriptions, companies, especially the ones building services on top of their models, are expected to pay per token. Same applies to various third party tools.
The belief is that the subscriptions are subsidized by them (or just heavily cut into profit margins) so for whatever reason they're trying to maintain control over the harness - maybe to gather more usage analytics and gain an edge over competitors and improve their models better to work with it, or perhaps to route certain requests to Haiku or Sonnet instead of using Opus for everything, to cut down on the compute.
Given the ample usage limits, I personally just use Claude Code now with their 100 USD per month subscription because it gives me the best value - kind of sucks that they won't support other harnesses though (especially custom GUIs for managing parallel tasks/projects). OpenCode never worked well for me on Windows though, also used Codex and Gemini CLI.
>or perhaps to route certain requests to Haiku or Sonnet instead of using Opus for everything, to cut down on the compute
You can point Claude Code at a local inference server (e.g. llama.cpp, vLLM) and see which model names it sends each request to. It's not hard to do a MITM against it either. Claude Code does send some requests to Haiku, but not the ones you're making with whatever model you have it set to - these are tool result processing requests, conversation summary / title generation requests, etc - low complexity background stuff.
Now, Anthropic could simply take requests to their Opus model and internally route them to Sonnet on the server side, but then it wouldn't really matter which harness was used or what the client requests anyway, as this would be happening server-side.
Anthropic's model deployments for Claude Code are likely optimized for Claude Code. I wouldn't be surprised if they had optimizations like sharing of system prompt KV-cache across users, or a speculative execution model specifically fine-tuned for the way Claude Code does tool calls.
When setting your token limits, their economics calculations likely assume that those optimizations are going to work. If you're using a different agent, you're basically underpaying for your tokens.
It’s probably a mixture of things including direct control over how the api is called and used as pointed out above and giving a discount for using their ecosystem. They are in fact a business so it should not surprise anyone they act as one.
It might well be a mixture, but 95% of that mixture is vendor lock in. Same reason they don't support AGENTS.md, they want to add friction in switching.
It's very straightforward to instrument CC under tmux with send-keys and capturep. You could easily use that for distillation, IMO. There are also detailed I/O logs.
Anthropic has an API, you can use any client but they charge per input/output/cache token.
One-price-per-month subscriptions (Claude Code Pro/MAX @ $20/$100/$200 a month) use a different authentication mechanism, OAUTH. The useful difference is you get a lot more inference than you can for the same cost using the API but they require you to use Claude Code as a client.
Some clients have made it simple to use your subscription key with them and they are getting cease and desist letters.
The highest in in the industry for API pricing right now is GPT-5.4-Pro, OpenRouter adding that as an option in their Auto Router was when I had to go customise the routing settings because it was not even close to providing $30/m input tokens and $180/m output tokens of value (for context Opus 4.6 is $5/m input and $25/m output)
(Ok, technically o1-pro is even more expensive, but I'm assuming that's a "please move on" pricing)
Sometimes people want to be real pedants about licensing terms when it comes to OSS, assuming such terms are completely bulletproof, other times people don't think the terms of their agreement with a service provider should have any force at all.
I pay $100/mo to Anthropic. Yesterday I coded one small feature via an API key by accident and it cost $6. At this rate, it will cost me $1000/mo to develop with Opus. I might as well code by hand, or switch to the $20 Codex plan, which will probably be more than enough.
I'd rather switch to OpenAI than give up my favorite harness.
My monthly "connection fee" is more than that (no solar, just EV). Your cartel needs to step it up!
For me it's $0.8/kWh during peak, $0.47 off peak, and super off peak of $0.15. I accidentally left a little mini 500W heater on all day, while I was out, costing > 5% of your whole month!
Yeah I had a similar experience one time. Which is why I laugh when people suggest Anthropic is profitable. Sure, maybe if everyone does API pricing. Which they won’t because it’s so damn expensive. Another way to think about it is API pricing is a glimpse into the future when everyone is dependent on these services and the subscription model price increases start.
IMO, OpenAI have either implicitly committed to becoming the IT service for Trump's secret police, or they've willingly signed up for the harsh retaliation Anthropic's getting, knowing that the Trump administration will inevitably try to push OpenAI around in the same way, if they meaningfully refuse to assist in domestic mass surveillance efforts.
probably more agents to be blocked by anthropic. i've seen theo from t3.gg go through a bunch of loopholes to support claude in his t3code app just so anthropic doesn't sue their asses.
There are boards starting in the $1500-$2000 range, and complete systems in the $2500-$2700 range. I actually don't know of any Strix Halo mini PCs that cost $3000, do you?
EDIT: The system I bought last summer for $1980 and just took delivery of in October, Beelink GTR 9 Pro, is now $2999.... wow...
I love OpenCode! I wrote a plugin that adds two tools: prune and retrieve. Prune lets the LLM select messages to remove from the conversation and replace with a summary and key terms. The retrieve tool lets it get those original messages back in case they're needed. I've been livestreaming the development and using it on side projects to make sure it's actually effective... And it turns out it really is! It feels like working with an infinite context window.
Long tool outputs/command outputs everything in my harness is spilled over to the filesystem. Context messages are truncated and split to filesystem with a breadcrumb for retrieving the full message.
The simplicity of extending pi is in itself addictive, but even in its raw form it does the job well.
Before finding pi I had written a lot of custom stuff on top of all the provider specific CLI tools (codex, Claude, cursor-agent, Gemini) - but now I don’t have to anymore (except if I want to use my anthropic sub, which I will now cancel for that exact reason)
Pi is refreshingly minimal in terms of system prompts, but still works really well and that makes me wonder whether other harnesses are overdoing. Look at OpenCode's prompts, for instance - long, mostly based on feels and IMO unnecessary. I would've liked to just overwrite OC's system prompts with Pi's (to get other features that Pi doesn't have) but that isn't possible today (without maintaining a custom fork)
JS is not something that was developed with CLI in mind and on top of that that language does not lend itself to be good for LLM generation as it has pretty weak validation compared to e.g. Rust, or event C, even python.
For a TUI agent, runtime performance is not the bottleneck, not by far. Hackability is the USP. Pi has extensions hotreloading which comes almost for free with jiti. The fact that the source is the shipped artifact (unlike Go/Rust) also helps the agent seeing its own code and the ability to write and load its own extensions based on that. A fact that OpenClaw’s success is in part based on IMO.
I can’t find the tweet from Mario (the author), but he prefers the Typescript/npm ecosystem for non-performance critical systems because it hits a sweet spot for him. I admire his work and he’s a real polyglot, so I tend to think he has done his homework. You’ll find pi memory usage quite low btw.
Pi is good stuff and refreshingly simple and malleable.
I used it recently inside a CI workflow in GitLab to automatically create ChangeLog.md entries for commits. That + Qwen 3.5 has been pretty successful. The job starts up Pi programatically, points it at the commits in question, and tells it to explore and get all the context it needs within 600 seconds... and it works. I love that this is possible.
I’ve been extraordinarily productive with this, their $10 Go plan, and a rigorous spec-driven workflow. Haven’t touched Claude in 2 months.
I sprinkle in some billed API usage to power my task-planner and reviewer subagents (both use GPT 5.4 now).
The ability to switch models is very useful and a great learning experience. GLM, Kimi and their free models surprised me. Not the best, not perfect, but still very productive. I would be a wary shareholder if I owned a stake in the frontier labs… that moat seems to be shrinking fast.
It's been a moving target for years at this point.
Both open and closed source models have been getting better, but not sure if the open source models have really been closing the gap since DeepSeek R1.
But yes: If the top closed source models were to stop getting better today, it wouldn't take long for open source to catch up.
Can you talk more about how you leverage higher quality models for the stuff that counts? Anywhere I can read more on the philosophy of when to use each?
Sure happy to share. It’s been trial and error, but I’ve learned that for agents to reliably ship a large feature or refactor, I need a good spec (functional acceptance criteria) and I need a good plan for sequencing the work.
The big expensive models are great at planning tasks and reviewing the implementation of a task. They can better spot potential gotchas, performance or security gaps, subtle logic and nuance that cheaper models fail to notice.
The small cheap models are actually great (and fast) at generating decent code if they have the right direction up front.
So I do all the spec writing myself (with some LLM assistance), and I hand it to a Supervisor agent who coordinates between subagents. Plan -> implement -> review -> repeat until the planner says “all done”.
I switch up my models all the time (actively experimenting) but today I was using GPT 5.4 for review and planning, costing me about $0.4-$1 for a good sized task, and Kimi for implementation. Sometimes my spec takes 4-5 review loops and the cost can add up over an 8 hour day. Still cheaper than Claude Max (for now, barely).
Each agent retains a fairly small context window which seems to keep costs down and improves output. Full context can be catastrophic for some models.
As for the spec writing, this is the fun part for me, and I’ve been obsessing over this process, and the process of tracking acceptance criteria and keeping my agents aligned to it. I have a toolkit cooking, you can find in my comment history (aiming to open source it this week).
I'm building a full stack web app, simple but with real API integrations with CC.
Moving so fast that I can barely keep a hold on what I'm testing and building at the same time, just using Sonnet. It's not bad at all. A lot of the specs develop as I'm testing the features, either as an immediate or a todo / gh issue.
The moat is having researchers that can produce frontier models. When OpenCode starts building frontier models, then I'd be worried; otherwise they're just another wrapper
"OpenCode Go" (a subscription) lets you use lots of hosted open-weights frontier AI models, such as GLM-5 (currently right up there in the frontier model leaderboards) for $10 per month.
Stupid question, but are there models worth using that specialize in a particular programming language? For instance, I'd love to be able to run a local model on my GPU that is specific to C/C++ or Python. If such a thing exists, is it worth it vs one of the cloud-based frontier models?
I'm guessing that a model which only covers a single language might be more compact and efficient vs a model trained across many languages and non-programming data.
I'm currently experimenting with (trying to) fine tune Qwen3.5 to make it better at a given language (Nim in this case); but I am quite bad at this, and honestly am unsure if it's even really fully feasible at the scale I have access to. Certainly been fun so far though, and I have a little Asus GX10 box on the way to experiment some more!
I don't use it for coding but as an agent backend. Maybe opencode was thought for coding mainly, but for me, it's incredibly good as an agent, especially when paired with skills, a fastapi server, and opencode go(minimax) is just so much intelligence at an incredibly cheap price. Plus, you can talk to it via channels if you use a claw.
I'd really like to get more clarification on offline mode and privacy. The github issues related to privacy did not leave a good feeling, despite being initially excited. Is offline mode a thing yet? I want to use this, but I don't want my code to leave my device.
you'll be surprised the name was actually a controversy on x/twitter since opencode was originally another dev's idea who joined the charmcli team. they wanted to keep that name but dax somehow (?) ended up squatting it. the charmcli team has renamed their tool to "crush" which matches their other tools a lot better than "opencode"
i've been using this as my primary harness for llama.cpp models, Claude, and Gemini for a few months now. the LSP integration is great. i also built a plugin to enable a very minimal OpenClaw alternative as a self modifying hook system over IPC as a plugin for OpenCode: https://github.com/khimaros/opencode-evolve -- and here's a deployment ready example making use of it which runs in an Incus container/VM: https://github.com/khimaros/persona
Very cool! I have been using opencode, as almost everybody else in the lab is using codex. I found the tools thing inside your own repo amazing but somehow I could not get it to reliably get opencode to write its own tools. Seems also a bit scary as there is pretty much not much security by default. I am using it in a NixOS WSL2 VM
What would be the advantage using this over say VSCode with Copilot or Roo Code? I need to make some time to compare, but just curious if others have a good insight on things.
I started out using VSCode with their Claude plugin; it seemed like a totally unnecessary integration. A better workflow seems to just run Claude Code directly on my machine where there are fewer restrictions - it just opens a lot more possibilities on what it can do
Ok I get it now, same with the vim comment above, it seems VSCode has the more IDE setup while OpenCode is giving the vim nerdtree vibe? I'll have to take a look, it makes sense to possibly have both for different use cases I guess.
I wish they would add back support for anthropic max/pro plans via calling the claude cli in -p mode. As I understand thats still very much allowed usage of claude code cli (as you are still using claude cli as it was intended anyway and fixes the issue of cache hits which I believe were the primary reason anthropic sent them the c&d). I love the UX from OpenCode (I loved setting it up in web mode on my home server and code from the web browser vs doing claude code over ssh) but until I can use my pro/max subscription I can't go back, the API pricing is way too much for my third world country wallet.
I use it with Qwen 3.5 running locally when my daily limits run out on my other subscriptions.
The harness is great. Local models are just slow enough that the subscription models are easier to use. For most of my tasks these days, the model's capability is sufficient; it is just not as snappy.
One thing I like with Aider is the fact that I can control the context by using /add explicitly on a subset of files. Can you achieve the same wit OpenCode ?
I'm curious: I'venever touched cloud models beyond a few seconds. I run a AMD395+ with the new qwen coder. Is there any intelligence difference, or is it just speed and context? At 128GB, it takes quite awhile before getting context wall.
There's a difference in intelligence. However for 90% of what I'm doing I don't really need it. The online models are just faster.
I just did a one hour vibe session today, ripping out a library dependency and replacing it with another and pushing the library to pypi. I should take my task list and let the local model replicate the work and see how it works out.
Can someone explain how Claude Code can instantly determine what file I have open and what lines I have selected in VS Code even if it's just running in a VS Code terminal instance, yet I cannot for the life of me get OpenCode to come anywhere close to that same experience?
The OpenCode docs suggest its possible, but it only works with their extension (not in an already open VS Code terminal) with a very specific keyboard shortcut and only barely at that.
I tried to use it but OpenCode won't even open for me on Wayland (Ubuntu 24.04), whichever terminal emulator I use. I wasn't even aware TUI could have compatibility issues with Wayland
Definitely not Wayland related, or so I doubt. I'm on wayland and never had any issues, and it's a TUI, where the terminal emulator does or does not do GPU work. What led you to that conclusion?
> On Linux, some Wayland setups can cause blank windows or compositor errors.
> If you’re on Wayland and the app is blank/crashing, try launching with OC_ALLOW_WAYLAND=1.
> If that makes things worse, remove it and try launching under an X11 session instead.
OC_ALLOW_WAYLAND=1 didn't work for me (Ubuntu 24.04)
Suggesting to use a different display server to use a TUI (!!) seems a bit wild to me. I didn't put a lot of time into investigating this so maybe there is another reason than Wayland. Anyway I'm using Pi now
I use this. I run it in a sandbox[0]. I run it inside Emacs vterm so it's really quick for me to jump back and forth between this and magit, which I use to review what it's done.
I really should look into more "native" Emacs options as I find using vterm a bit of a clunky hack. But I'm just not that excited about this stuff right now. I use it because I'm lazy, that's all. Right now I'm actually getting into woodwork.
Being able to assign different models to subagents is the feature I've been wanting. I use Claude Code daily and burning the same expensive model on simple file lookups hurts. Any way to set default model routing rules, or is it manual per task?
With OpenCode, I've found that I can do this by defining agents, assigning each agent a specifically model to use. Then K manually flip to that agent when I want it or define some might rules in my global AGENTS.nd file to gives some direction and OpenCode will automatically subtask out to the agent, which then forces the use of the defined model.
Yeah, support the company that promised to help your government illegally mass surveil and mass kill people, because they support a use case slightly better than the non-mass-murdering option.
You are absolutely correct that both are evil ... as are most corporations.
Still, I feel like "will commit illegal mass murder against their own citizens" is a significant enough degree more evil. I think lots of corporations will help their government murder citizens of other countries, but very few would go so far as to agree to murder their own (fellow) citizens ... just to get a juicy contract.
I see your viewpoint but, to me, "both will happily murder you but one is better because they won't murder ME!" isn't very compelling. Like, I get it, but also it changes nothing for me. They're both bad.
It's not about "won't murder me" it's about "won't murder their own tribe". Humans are very tribal creatures, and we have all sorts of built-in societal taboos about betraying our tribe.
We also have taboos against betraying/murdering/whatever people of other tribes, but those taboos are much weaker and get relaxed sometimes (eg. in war). My point is, it takes significantly more anti-social (ie. evil) behavior to betray your own tribe, in the deepest way possible, than it does to do horrible things to other tribes.
This is just as much true for Russians murdering Ukranians as Ukranians murdering Russians, or any other conflict group: almost all Russians would consider a Russian who helps kill Russians to be more evil than a Russian who kills Ukranians (and vice versa).
Right, but I consider someone who'll murder exclusively other tribes to be infinitely closer to someone who'll murder their own tribe than to someone who won't murder anyone.
You're right, Anthropic shouldn't have even taken a moral stance here at all. They should have just gone full send and allowed everything, because there will never be satisfying some people. Why even try?
Many folks from other tools are only getting exposed to the same functionality they got used to, but it offers much more than other harnesses, especially for remote coding.
You can start a service via `opencode serve`, it can be accessed from anywhere and has great experience on mobile except a few bugs. It's a really good way to work with your agents remotely, goes really well with TailScale.
The WebUI that they have can connect to multiple OpenCode backends at once, so you may use multiple VPS-es for various projects you have and control all of them from a single place.
Lastly, there's a desktop app, but TBH I find it redundant when WebUI has everything needed.
Make no mistakes though, it's not a perfect tool, my gripes with it:
- There are random bugs with loading/restoring state of the session
- Model/Provider selection switch across sessions/projects is often annoying
- I had a bug making Sonnet/Opus unusable from mobile phone because phone's clock was 150ms ahead of laptop's (ID generation)
- Sometimes agent get randomly stuck. It especially sucks for long/nested sessions
- WebUI on laptop just completely forgot all the projects at
one day
- `opencode serve` doesn't pick up new skills automatically, it needs to be restarted
The MCP (Model Context Protocol) support is what makes this interesting to me. Most coding agents treat the file system and shell as the only surfaces — MCP opens up the possibility of connecting to any structured data source or API as a first-class tool without custom integration work each time.
Curious how the context window management works in practice. With large repos, the "what files to include" problem tends to dominate — does it have a strategy beyond embedding-based retrieval, or is that the main approach here?
- GH copilot API is a first class citizen with access to multiple providers’ models at a very good price with a pro plan
- no terminal flicker
- it seems really good with subagents
- I can’t see any terminal history inside my emacs vterm :(
I had been using open code and admire they effort to create something huge and help a lot of developers around the world, connecting LLM our daily work without use a browser!
One thing that makes coding agents really useful is structured data access via MCP servers. Instead of the agent trying to scrape a webpage to understand your project's context, you give it a direct API to query structured data from 9+ sources (GitHub repos, Stack Overflow questions, arXiv papers, npm packages).
The biggest bottleneck I've seen isn't the coding — it's the agent not having enough context about the ecosystem it's working in.
The maintaining team is incredibly petty though. Tantrums when they weren't allowed to abuse Claude subscriptions and had to use the API instead. They just removed API support entirely.
Things that make an an OpenCode fanboy
1. OpenCode source code is even more awesome. I have learned so much from the way they have organized tools, agents, settings and prompts.
2. models.dev is an amazing free resource of LLM endpoints these guys have put together
3. OpenCode Zen almost always has a FREE coding model that you can use for all kinds of work. I recently used the free tier to organize and rename all my documents.
Honestly I was a Claude code only guy for a while. I switched to opencode and I’m not going back.
IMO, the web UI is a killer feature - it’s got just enough to be an agent manager - without any fluff. I run it on my remote VMs and connect over HTTP.
This is very interesting. This could allow custom harnesses to be used economically with Opus. Depending on the usage limits, this may be cheaper than their API.
You can scroll down literally two messages in the Github issue you linked:
> there isnt any telemetry, the open telemetry thing is if you want to get spans like the ai sdk has spans to track tokens and stuff but we dont send them anywhere and they arent enabled either
> most likely these requests are for models.dev (our models api which allows us to update the models list without needing new releases)
> There is currently no option to change this behavior, no startup flag, nothing. You do not have the option to serve the web app locally, using `opencode web` just automatically opens the browser with the proxied web app, not a true locally served UI.
I used Codex for a long time. It's definitely better than Claude Code due to being open source, but opencode is nicer to use. Good hotkeys, plan/build modes, fast and easy model switching, good mcp support. Supports skills, is not the fastest but good enough.
Just a data point, I would need to use it for my workflows. I do have a monorepo with a root level claude.md, and project level claude.md files for backend/frontend.
I started with Codex, then switched to OpenCode, then switched to Codex.
OpenCode just has more bugs, it's incredibly derivative so it doesn't really do anything else than Codex.
The advantage of OpenCode is that it can use any underlying model, but that's a disadvantage because it breaks the native integration. If you use Opus + Claude Code, or Gpt-Codex + Codex App, you are using it the way it was designed to be used.
If you don't actually use different models, or plan to switch, or somehow value vendor neutrality strategically, you are paying a large cost without much reward.
This is in general a rule, vendor neutrality is often seen as a generic positive, but it is actually a tradeoff. If you just build on top of AWS for example, you make use of it's features and build much faster and simpler than if you use Terraform.
You do not "write" code. Stop these euphemisms. It is an intellectual prosthetic for feeble minded people that plagiarizes code by written by others. And it connects to the currently "free" providers who own the means of plagiarizing.
There is nothing open about it. Please do not abuse the term "open" like in OpenBSD.
What I don't understand is that, if coding agents are making coding obsolete, why do these vibe coders not choose a language that doesn't set their users' compute resources on fire? Just vibe rust or golang for their cli tools, no one reviews code slop nowadays anyway /s.
I do not understand the insistence on using JavaScript for command line tools. I don't use rust at all, but if I'm making a vibe coded cli I'm picking rust or golang. Not zig because coding agents can't handle the breaking changes. What better test of agentic coders' conviction in their belief in AI than to vibe a language they can't read.
Just remember, OpenCode is sending telemetry to their own servers, even when you're using your own locally hosted models. There are no environment variables, flags, or other configuration options to disable this behavior.¹
At least you can easily turn off telemetry in Claude Code - just set CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC to 1.
You can use Claude Code with llama.cpp and vLLM, too right out of the box with no additional software necessary, just point ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL at your inference server of choice, with any value in ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.
Some people think that Anthropic could disable this at any time, but that's not really true - you can disable automatic updates and back up and reuse native Claude Code binaries, ensuring Anthropic cannot change your existing local Claude Code binary's behavior.
With that said, I like the idea of an open source TUI agent that won't spy on me without my consent and no way to disable it much better than a closed source TUI agent that I can effectively neuter telemetry on, but sadly, OpenCode is not the former. It's just another piece of VC-funded spyware that's destined for enshittification.
Are you sure that endpoint is sending all traffic to opencode? I'm not familiar with Hono but it looks like a catch all route if none of the above match and is used to serve the front-end web interface?
OpenCode was the first open source agent I used, and my main workhorse after experimenting briefly with Claude Code and realizing the potential of agentic coding. Due to that, and because it's a popular an open source alternative, I want to be able to recommend it and be enthusiastic about it. The problem for me is that the development practices of the people that are working on it are suboptimal at best; they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things (or even build a proper list of changes for each release), and they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace.
More than that, it's an extremely large and complex TypeScript code base — probably larger and more complex than it needs to be — and (partly as a result) it's fairly resource inefficient (often uses 1GB of RAM or more. For a TUI).
On top of that, at least I personally find the TUI to be overbearing and a little bit buggy, and the agent to be so full of features that I don't really need — also mildly buggy — that it sort of becomes hard to use and remember how everything is supposed to work and interact.
I am more concerned about their, umm, gallant approach to security. Not only that OpenCode is permissive by default in what it is allowed to do, but that it apparently tries to pull its config from the web (provider-based URL) by default [1]. There is also this open GitHub issue [2], which I find quite concerning (worst case, it's an RCE vulnerability).
[1] https://opencode.ai/docs/config/#precedence-order
[2] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10939
It also sends all of your prompts to Grok's free tier by default, and the free tier trains on your submitted information, X AI can do whatever they want with that, including building ad profiles, etc.
You need to set an explicit "small model" in OpenCode to disable that.
This. I work on projects that warrant a self hosted model to ensure nothing is leaked to the cloud. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that even though the only configured model is local, all my prompts are sent to the cloud to... generate a session title. Fortunately caught during testing phase.
It uses a model called "Big Pickle" by default which is an alias for minimax 2.5, as far as I've been able to tell.
I second that.
Have fun on windows - automatic no from me. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
Who cares about Windows?
people who don't make OS preferences their entire personality
People who don't like messing around with drivers and like running Linux VMs on a Windows OS.
What? Drivers?
I do: they're important for ventilation in this heat wave.
RCE is exactly the feature of coding agents. I'm happy with it that I don't need to launch OpenCode with --dangerously-skip every time.
I assign a specific user for it, which doesn't have much access to my files. So what I want is complete autonomy.
I’ve been testing opencode and it feels TUI in appearance only. I prefer commandline and TUIs and in my mind TUI idea is to be low level, extremely portable interface and to get out of the way. Opencode does not have low color, standard terminal theme so had to switch to a proper terminal program. Copy paste is hijacked so I need to write code out to file in order to get a snippet. The enter key (as in the return by the keypad) does not work for sending a line. I have not tested but don’t think this would work over SSH even. I have been googling around to find if I am holding it wrong but it feels to break expectations of a terminal app in a way that I wish they would have made it a gui. Makes me sad because I think the goods are there and it’s otherwise good.
> The problem for me is that the development practices of the people that are working on it are suboptimal at best; they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things (or even build a proper list of changes for each release), and they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace.
this is what i notice with openclaw as well. there have been releases where they break production features. unfortunately this is what happens when code becomes a commidity, everyone thinks that shipping fast is the moat but at the expense of suboptimality since they know a fix can be implemented quickly on the next release.
Openclaw has 20k commits, almost 700k lines of code, and it is only four months old. I feel confident that that sort of code base would have a no coherent architecture at all, and also that no human has a good mental model of how the various subsystems interact.
I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot from these early days of agentic coding.
> I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot from these early days of agentic coding.
So far what I am learning (from watching all of this) is that our constant claims that quality and security matter seem to not be true on average. Depressingly.
> So far what I am learning (from watching all of this) is that our constant claims that quality and security matter seem to not be true on average.
Only for the non-pro users. After all, those users were happy to use excel to write the programs.
What we're seeing now is that more and more developers find they are happy with even less determinism than the Excel process.
Maybe they're right; maybe software doesn't need any coherence, stability, security or even correctness. Maybe the class of software they produce doesn't need those things.
I, unfortunately, am unable to adopt this view.
I think what we're seeing is a phase transition. In the early days of any paradigm shift, velocity trumps stability because the market rewards first movers.
But as agents move from prototypes to production, the calculus changes. Production systems need: - Memory continuity across sessions - Predictable behavior across updates - Security boundaries that don't leak
The tools that prioritize these will win the enterprise market. The ones that don't will stay in the prototype/hobbyist space.
We're still in the "move fast" phase, but the "break things" part is starting to hurt real users. The pendulum will swing back.
> our constant claims that quality and security matter
I'm 13 years into this industry, this is the first I'm hearing of this.
I’ve heard the "S" in IoT stands for Security.
It's understandable and even desirable that a new piece of code rapidly evolves as they iterate and fix bugs. I'd only be concerned if they keep this pattern for too long. In the early phases, I like keeping up with all the cutting edge developments. Projects where dev get afraid to ship because of breaking things end up becoming bloated with unnecessary backward compatibility.
We're still in the very early days of generative AI, and people and markets are already prioritizing quality over quantity. Quantity is irrelevant when it comes value.
All code is not fungible, "irreverent code that kinda looks okay at first glance" might be a commodity, but well-tested, well-designed and well-understood code is what's valuable.
Generative what? Code is not a thing anymore, in fact it never really was, but now it's definitely not.
Code today can be as verbose and ugly as ever, because from here on out, fewer people are going to read it, understand and care about it.
What's valuable, and you know this I think, is how much money your software will sell for, not how fine and polished your code is.
Code was a liability. Today it's a liability that cost much much less.
Claude Code breaks production features and doesn't say anything about it. The product has just shifted gears with little to no ceremony.
I expect that from something guiding the market, but there have been times where stuff changes, and it isn't even clear if it is a bug or a permanent decision. I suspect they don't even know.
I'm still trying to figure out how "open" it really is; There are reports that it phones home a lot[0], and there is even a fork that claims to remove this behavior[1]:
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencod...
[1] https://github.com/standardnguyen/rolandcode
the fact that somebody was able to fork it and remove behaviour they didn't want suggests that it is very open
that #12446 PR hasn't even been resolved to won't merge and last change was a week ago (in a repo with 1.8k+ open PRs)
I think there’s a conflict between “open” as in “open source”, and “open” as in “open about the practice” paired with the fact we usually don’t review software’s source scrupulously enough to spot unwanted behaviors”.
Must be a karmic response from “Free” /s
so how is telemetry not open? If you don't like telemetry for dogmatic reasons then don't use it. Find the alternative magical product whose dev team is able to improve the software blindfolded
> Find the alternative magical product whose dev team is able to improve the software blindfolded
The choice isn't "telemetry or you're blindfolded", the other options include actually interacting with your userbase. Surveys exist, interviews exist, focus groups exist, fostering communities that you can engage is a thing, etc.
For example, I was recruited and paid $500 to spend an hour on a panel discussing what developers want out of platforms like DigitalOcean, what we don't like, where our pain points are. I put the dollar amount there only to emphasize how valuable such information is from one user. You don't get that kind of information from telemetry.
> Surveys exist, interviews exist, focus groups exist, fostering communities that you can engage is a thing, etc.
We all know it’s extremely, extremely hard to interact with your userbase.
> For example I was paid $500 an hour
+the time to find volunteers doubled that, so for $1000 an hour x 10 user interviews, a free software can have feedback from 0.001% of their users. I dislike telemetry, but it’s a lie to say it’s optional.
—a company with no telemetry on neither of our downloadable or cloud product.
Or by testing it themselves.
OpenCode's creator acknowledged that the ease of shipping has let them ship prototype features that probably weren't worth shipping and that they need to invest more time cleaning up and fixing things.
https://x.com/thdxr/status/2031377117007454421
Uff. This is exactly what Casey Muratori and his friend was talking about in of their more recent podcast. Features that would never get implemented because of time constraints now do thanks to LLMs and now they have a huge codebase to maintain
Well that's good to hear, maybe they'll improve moving forward on the release aspect at least.
What to release > What to build > Build anything faster
I recently listened to this episode from the Claude Code creator (here is the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4) and it sounded like their development process was somewhat similar - he said something like their entire codebase has 100% churn every 6 months. But I would assume they have a more professional software delivery process.
I would (incorrectly) assume that a product like this would be heavily tested via AI - why not? AI should be writing all the code, so why would the humans not invest in and require extreme levels of testing since AI is really good at that?
I've gotta say, it shows. Claude Code has a lot of stupid regressions on a regular basis, shit that the most basic test harness should catch.
I mean, I'm slowly trying to learn lightweight formal methods (i.e. what stuff like Alloy or Quint do), behavior driven development, more advanced testing systems for UIs, red-green TDD, etc, which I never bothered to learn as much before, precisely because they can handle the boilerplate aspects of these things, so I can focus on specifying the core features or properties I need for the system, or thinking through the behavior, information flow, and architecture of the system, and it can translate that into machine-verifiable stuff, so that my code is more reliable! I'm very early on that path, though. It's hard!
Probably all describe problems stem from the developers using agent coding; including using TypeScript, since these tools are usually more familiar with Js/Js adjacent web development languages.
Perhaps the use of coding agents may have encouraged this behavior, but it is perfectly possible to do the opposite with agents as well — for instance, to use agents to make it easier to set up and maintain a good testing scaffold for TUI stuff, a comprehensive test suite top to bottom, in a way maintainers may not have had the time/energy/interest to do before, or to rewrite in a faster and more resource efficient language that you may find more verbose, be less familiar with, or find annoying to write — and nothing is forcing them to release as often as they are, instead of just having a high commit velocity. I've personally found AIs to be just as good at Go or Rust as TypeScript, perhaps better, as well, so I don't think there was anything forcing them to go with TypeScript. I think they're just somewhat irresponsible devs.
The value of having (and executing) a coherent product vision is extremely undervalued in FOSS, and IMO the difference between a successful project in the long-term and the kind of sploogeware that just snowballs with low-value features.
> The value of having (and executing) a coherent product vision is extremely undervalued in FOSS
Interesting you say this because I'd say the opposite is true historically, especially in the systems software community and among older folks. "Do one thing and do it well" seems to be the prevailing mindset behind many foundational tools. I think this why so many are/were irked by systemd. On the other hand newer tools that are more heavily marketed and often have some commercial angle seem to be in a perpetual state of tacking on new features in lieu of refining their raison d'etre.
negative values even.
I’m a little surprised by your description of constant releases and instability. That matches how I would describe Claude Code, and has been one of the main reasons I tend to use OpenCode more than Claude Code.
OpenCode has been much more stable for me in the 6 months or so that I’ve been comparing the two in earnest.
I use Droid specifically because Claude Code breaks too often for me. And then Droid broke too (but rarely), and I just stuck to not upgrading (like I don't upgrade WebStorm. Dev tools are so fragile)
Yeah every time I want to like it, scrolling is glitched vs codex and Claude. And other various things like: why is this giant model list hard coded for ollama or other local methods vs loading what I actually have...
On top of that. Open code go was a complete scam. It was not advertised as having lower quality models when I paid and glm5 was broken vs another provider, returning gibberish and very dumb on the same prompt
I agree. Since tools like Codex let you use SOTA models more cheaply and with looser weekly limits, I think they’re the smarter choice.
> they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things
Tbf, this seems exactly like Claude Code, they are releasing about one new version per day, sometimes even multiple per day. It’s a bit annoying constantly getting those messages saying to upgrade cc to the latest version
Oh wow. I got multiple messages in a day and just assumed it was a cache bug.
It's annoying how I always get that "claude code has a native installer xyz please upgrade" message
I've never gotten that message?
Drives me nuts that we have TUIs written in friggin TS now.
That being said, I do prefer OpenCode to Codex and Claude Code.
Why to you prefer? I have a different experience, and want to learn.
(I'm also hating on TS/JS: but some day some AI will port it to Rust, right?)
The biggest reason is I don't like being locked into an ecosystem. I can use whatever I want with OpenCode, not so much with Codex and Claude Code. Right now I'm only using GPT with it, but I like the option.
CC I have the least experience with. It just seemed buggy and unpolished to me. Codex was fine, but there was something about it that just didn't feel right. It seemed fined for code tasks but just as often I want to do research or discuss the code base, and for whatever reason I seemed to get terse less useful answers using Codex even when it's backed by the same model.
OpenCode works well, I haven't had any issues with bugs or things breaking, and it just felt comfortable to use right from the jump.
How much of the development is being done by humans?
Yeah I tried using it when oh-my-opencode (now oh-my-openagent) started popping off and found it had highly unstable. I just stick with internal tooling now.
What is a better option?
For serious coding work I use the Zed Agent; for everything else I use pi with a few skills. Overall, though, I'd recommend Pi plus a few extensions for any features you miss extremely highly. It's also TypeScript, but doesn't suffer from the other problems OC has IME. It's a beautiful little program.
Big +1 to Pi[1]. The simplicity makes it really easy to extend yourself too, so at this point I have a pretty nice little setup that's very specific to my personal workflows. The monorepo for the project also has other nice utilities like a solid agent SDK. I also use other tools like Claude Code for "serious" work, but I do find myself reaching for Pi more consistently as I've gotten more confident with my setup.
[1] https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
I've been building VT Code (https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode), a Rust-based semantic coding agent. Just landed Codex OAuth with PKCE exchange, credentials go into the system keyring.
I build VT Code with Tree-sitter for semantic understanding and OS-native sandboxing. It's still early but I confident it usable. I hope you'll give it a try.
https://charm.land/crush
I tried crush when it first came out - the vibes were fun but it didn’t seem to be particularly good even vs aider. Is it better now?
Disclaimer: I work for Charm, so my opinion may be biased.
But we did a lot of work on improving the experience, both on UX, performance, and the actual reliability of the agent itself.
I would suggest you to give it a try.
Will do thanks - any standout features or clever things for me to look out for?
Rust > TS Codex > OpenCode
its hard not to wonder if they are taking their own medicine, but not quite properly
Isn't this pretty much the standard across projects that make heavy use of AI code generation?
Using AI to generate all your code only really makes sense if you prioritize shipping features as fast as possible over the quality, stability and efficiency of the code, because that's the only case in which the actual act of writing code is the bottleneck.
I don't think that's true at all. As I said, in a response to another person blaming it on agentic coding above, there are a very large number of ways to use coding agents to make your programs faster, more efficient, more reliable, and more refined that also benefit from agents making the code writing research, data piping, and refactoring process quicker and less exhausting. For instance, by helping you set up testing scaffolding, handling the boilerplate around tests while you specify some example features or properties you want to test and expands them, rewriting into a more efficient language, large-scale refactors to use better data structures or architectures, or allowing you to use a more efficient or reliable language that you don't know as well or find to have too much boilerplate or compiler annoyance to otherwise deal with yourself. Then there are sort of higher level more phenomenological or subjective benefits, such as helping you focus on the system architecture and data flow, and only zoom in on particular algorithms or areas of the code base that are specifically relevant, instead of forever getting lost in the weeds of thinking about specific syntax and compiler errors or looking up a bunch of API documentation that isn't super important for the core of what you're trying to do and so on.
Personally, I find this idea that "coding isn't the bottleneck" completely preposterous. Getting all of the API documentation, the syntax, organizing and typing out all of the text, finding the correct places in the code base and understanding the code base in general, dealing with silly compiler errors and type errors, writing a ton of error handling, dealing with the inevitable and inoraticable boilerplate of programming (unless you're one of those people that believe macros are actually a good idea and would meaningfully solve this), all are a regular and substantial occurrence, even if you aren't writing thousands of lines of code a day. And you need to write code in order to be able to get a sense for the limitations of the technology you're using and the shape of the problem you're dealing with in order to then come up with and iterate on a better architecture or approach to the problem. And you need to see your program running in order to evaluate whether it's functionality and design a satisfactory and then to iterate on that. So coding is actually the upfront costs that you need to pay in order to and even start properly thinking about a problem. So being able to get a prototype out quickly is very important. Also, I find it hard to believe that you've never been in a situation where you wanted to make a simple change or refactor that would have resulted in needing to update 15 different call sites to do properly in a way that was just slightly variable enough or complex enough that editor macros or IDE refactoring capabilities wouldn't be capable of.
That's not to mention the fact that if agentic coding can make deploying faster, then it can also make deploying the same amount at the same cadence easier and more relaxing.
You're both right. AI can be used to do either fast releases or well designed code. Don't say both, as you're not making time, you're moving time between those two.
Which one you think companies prefer? Or if you're a consulting business, which one do you think your clients prefer?
> AI can be used to do either fast releases or well designed code
I have yet to actually see a single example of the latter, though. OpenCode isn't an isolated case - every project with heavy AI involvement that I've personally examined or used suffers from serious architectural issues, tons of obvious bugs and quirks, or both. And these are mostly independent open source projects, where corporate interests are (hopefully) not an influence.
I will continue to believe it's not actually possible until I am proven wrong with concrete examples. The incentives just aren't there. It's easy to say "just mindlessly follow X principle and your software will be good", where X is usually some variation of "just add more tests", "just add more agents", "just spend more time planning" etc. but I choose to believe that good software cannot be created without the involvement of someone who has a passion for writing good software - someone who wouldn't want to let an LLM do the job for them in the first place.
By default OpenCode sends all of your prompts to Grok's free tier to come up with chat summaries for the UI.
To change that, you need to set a custom "small model" in the settings.
My understanding is that it’s best to set a whitelist in enabled_providers, which prevents it from using providers you don’t anticipate.
Seems like an anti-pattern to me to run AI models without user’s consent.
? The whole idea of a coding assistant is to send all your interactions with the program to the llm model.
The team also is not breathlessly talking about how coding is dead. They have pretty sane takes on AI coding including trying to help people who care about code quality.
Couldn’t tell by the way they write their software.
They probably don't have to write OKRs every quarter saying the opposite.
The security concerns raised here are valid and honestly underappreciated in the AI coding agent space broadly. The pattern of pulling config from remote URLs by default is a real footgun — it's essentially trusting arbitrary remote code in your development environment.
That said, the broader trend is interesting. We're seeing a rapid proliferation of open source coding agents (OpenCode, Aider, Continue, etc.) and each is making different tradeoffs around security, model flexibility, and UX. The ones that survive long-term will be the ones that get the security defaults right without sacrificing usability.
The resource usage point is worth noting too. 1GB+ RAM for a TUI is a symptom of the "let's rewrite everything in TypeScript/Electron" era. There's a reason obra/superpowers is trending with a shell-first approach — sometimes less abstraction is more.
The only thing I'm wondering is if they have eval frameworks (for lack of a better word). Their prompts don't seem to have changed for a while and I find greater success after testing and writing my own system prompts + modification to the harness to have the smallest most concise system prompt + dynamic prompt snippets per project.
I feel that if you want to build a coding agent / harness the first thing you should do is to build an evaluation framework to track performance for coding by having your internal metrics and task performance, instead I see most coding agents just fiddle with adding features that don't improve the core ability of a coding agent.
The Agent that is blacklisted from Anthropic AI, soon more to come.
I really like how their subagents work, as a bonus I get to choose which model is in which agent. Sadly I have to resort to the mess that Anthropic calls Claude Code
They are not blacklisted. You are allowed to use the API at commercial usage pricing. You are just not allowed to use your Claude Code subscription with OpenCode (or any other third‑party harness for the record).
I have my own harness I wrap Claude CLI in, I wonder if I'm breaking the rules...
If you're not paying full-fat API prices, then probably.
From what I've heard, the metrics used by Anthropic to detect unauthorized clients is pretty easy to sidestep if you look at the existing solutions out there. Better than getting your account banned.
No, they specifically said it’s only if you’re trying to build a whole other product for public consumption on top of it
I dont understand this, what is the difference, technically!
With Anthropic, you either pay per token with an API key (expensive), or use their subscription, but only with the tools that they provide you - Claude, Claude Cowork and Claude Code (both GUI and CLI variants). Individuals generally get to use the subscriptions, companies, especially the ones building services on top of their models, are expected to pay per token. Same applies to various third party tools.
The belief is that the subscriptions are subsidized by them (or just heavily cut into profit margins) so for whatever reason they're trying to maintain control over the harness - maybe to gather more usage analytics and gain an edge over competitors and improve their models better to work with it, or perhaps to route certain requests to Haiku or Sonnet instead of using Opus for everything, to cut down on the compute.
Given the ample usage limits, I personally just use Claude Code now with their 100 USD per month subscription because it gives me the best value - kind of sucks that they won't support other harnesses though (especially custom GUIs for managing parallel tasks/projects). OpenCode never worked well for me on Windows though, also used Codex and Gemini CLI.
>or perhaps to route certain requests to Haiku or Sonnet instead of using Opus for everything, to cut down on the compute
You can point Claude Code at a local inference server (e.g. llama.cpp, vLLM) and see which model names it sends each request to. It's not hard to do a MITM against it either. Claude Code does send some requests to Haiku, but not the ones you're making with whatever model you have it set to - these are tool result processing requests, conversation summary / title generation requests, etc - low complexity background stuff.
Now, Anthropic could simply take requests to their Opus model and internally route them to Sonnet on the server side, but then it wouldn't really matter which harness was used or what the client requests anyway, as this would be happening server-side.
Anthropic's model deployments for Claude Code are likely optimized for Claude Code. I wouldn't be surprised if they had optimizations like sharing of system prompt KV-cache across users, or a speculative execution model specifically fine-tuned for the way Claude Code does tool calls.
When setting your token limits, their economics calculations likely assume that those optimizations are going to work. If you're using a different agent, you're basically underpaying for your tokens.
- OR - it's about lock-in.
Build the single pane of glass everyone uses. Offer it under cost. Salt the earth and kill everything else that moves.
Nobody can afford to run alternative interfaces, so they die. This game is as old as time. Remember Reddit apps? Alternative Twitter clients?
In a few years, CC will be the only survivor and viable option.
It also kneecaps attempts to distill Opus.
It’s probably a mixture of things including direct control over how the api is called and used as pointed out above and giving a discount for using their ecosystem. They are in fact a business so it should not surprise anyone they act as one.
It might well be a mixture, but 95% of that mixture is vendor lock in. Same reason they don't support AGENTS.md, they want to add friction in switching.
They can try add as much as friction they want. A simple rename in the files and directories like .claude makes the thing work to move out of CC.
It’s not like moving from android to iOS.
You'd be surprised how effective small bits of friction are.
If it was lock in they wouldn't make it absolutely trivial to change inference providers in Claude Code.
It's very straightforward to instrument CC under tmux with send-keys and capturep. You could easily use that for distillation, IMO. There are also detailed I/O logs.
Subscription = token that requires refreshing 1-2x/day, and you get the freedom to use your subscription-level usage amount any way you want.
API = way more expensive, allowed to use on your terms without anthropic hindering you.
Also, Subscription: against the TOS of Claude Code, need to spoof a token and possibly get banned due to it.
Anthropic has an API, you can use any client but they charge per input/output/cache token.
One-price-per-month subscriptions (Claude Code Pro/MAX @ $20/$100/$200 a month) use a different authentication mechanism, OAUTH. The useful difference is you get a lot more inference than you can for the same cost using the API but they require you to use Claude Code as a client.
Some clients have made it simple to use your subscription key with them and they are getting cease and desist letters.
about 30 times more cost
Has it occurred to anyone that Anthropic highest in the industry API pricing is a play to drive you into their subscription? For the lock-in?
The highest in in the industry for API pricing right now is GPT-5.4-Pro, OpenRouter adding that as an option in their Auto Router was when I had to go customise the routing settings because it was not even close to providing $30/m input tokens and $180/m output tokens of value (for context Opus 4.6 is $5/m input and $25/m output)
(Ok, technically o1-pro is even more expensive, but I'm assuming that's a "please move on" pricing)
Sometimes people want to be real pedants about licensing terms when it comes to OSS, assuming such terms are completely bulletproof, other times people don't think the terms of their agreement with a service provider should have any force at all.
Was it not obvious what the OP meant by blacklisted?
Blacklisted usually means something is banned. OpenCode is not banned from using Anthropic's API.
No, it was not? For those whose native language is English, "blacklisted" implies Claude API will not allow OpenCode.
You can still use OpenCode with the Anthropic API.
Yep. That's what I do. Just API keys and you can switch from Opus to GPT especially this week when Opus has been kind of wonky.
I pay $100/mo to Anthropic. Yesterday I coded one small feature via an API key by accident and it cost $6. At this rate, it will cost me $1000/mo to develop with Opus. I might as well code by hand, or switch to the $20 Codex plan, which will probably be more than enough.
I'd rather switch to OpenAI than give up my favorite harness.
This is the intention. They do not want folks that can’t pay to use their service.
Out of curiosity, what's your next monthly subscription in terms of price?
Electricity, $95/mo.
Now you got me thinking my electric company should start offering subscription tiers in these uncertain energy times...
Ours never will, they're a cartel, sadly. If you mean fixed subscription, next one is Netflix, I think, or my server provider at $40 or so.
My monthly "connection fee" is more than that (no solar, just EV). Your cartel needs to step it up!
For me it's $0.8/kWh during peak, $0.47 off peak, and super off peak of $0.15. I accidentally left a little mini 500W heater on all day, while I was out, costing > 5% of your whole month!
Yeah I had a similar experience one time. Which is why I laugh when people suggest Anthropic is profitable. Sure, maybe if everyone does API pricing. Which they won’t because it’s so damn expensive. Another way to think about it is API pricing is a glimpse into the future when everyone is dependent on these services and the subscription model price increases start.
I don't get why people talk about ChatGPT as some great saviour though, they're in the same boat but just have more money to burn.
The trouble with openai is that by using them, you're supporting fascism.
Yes, you are doing it too with antropic an xAI. I don't get your point. xAI and OpenAI are a little worst? Maybe, still very well fascism.
IMO, OpenAI have either implicitly committed to becoming the IT service for Trump's secret police, or they've willingly signed up for the harsh retaliation Anthropic's getting, knowing that the Trump administration will inevitably try to push OpenAI around in the same way, if they meaningfully refuse to assist in domestic mass surveillance efforts.
Or have Claude write the code and Gemini review it. (Was using GPT for review until the recent Pentagon thing.)
You can also review the code you ship yourself.
'just API key' lol. just hundreds of dollars at a minimum
This is the problem with this bollocks. Outsourcing our brains at a per token rate. It'd be exciting if I didn't hand to pay Americans for it.
I'm testing glm5 on Claude code and opencode just to stop consuming American... Soo good so far!
Qwen works fine and requires paying no-one except a hardware vendor.
More what to come?
probably more agents to be blocked by anthropic. i've seen theo from t3.gg go through a bunch of loopholes to support claude in his t3code app just so anthropic doesn't sue their asses.
a $3000 AMD395+ will get you pretty close to a open development environment.
There are boards starting in the $1500-$2000 range, and complete systems in the $2500-$2700 range. I actually don't know of any Strix Halo mini PCs that cost $3000, do you?
EDIT: The system I bought last summer for $1980 and just took delivery of in October, Beelink GTR 9 Pro, is now $2999.... wow...
RAM has gone up a lot since last summer.
the boards now are pricier, at least the framework one. I got it for 1700, and now its ~$2400.
not mini PCs, no, but there are laptops that do
I bought mine, a mini PC, for $1400 just six months ago. This bubble will pass.
I love OpenCode! I wrote a plugin that adds two tools: prune and retrieve. Prune lets the LLM select messages to remove from the conversation and replace with a summary and key terms. The retrieve tool lets it get those original messages back in case they're needed. I've been livestreaming the development and using it on side projects to make sure it's actually effective... And it turns out it really is! It feels like working with an infinite context window.
https://www.youtube.com/live/z0JYVTAqeQM?si=oLvyLlZiFLTxL7p0
Hey I built that into my harness! http://github.com/computerex/z
Long tool outputs/command outputs everything in my harness is spilled over to the filesystem. Context messages are truncated and split to filesystem with a breadcrumb for retrieving the full message.
Works really well.
Have a look how pi.dev implements /tree. Super useful
That doesn't sound all that useful to be honest and would likely increase costs overall due to the hit to prompt caching by removing messages
Seems interesting, but at a glance I can't find a repo or a package manager download for this. Have you made it available anywhere?
I found the opencode fork repo, but no plugin seems available so far
https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/opencode
I'm a https://pi.dev man myself.
Same here!
The simplicity of extending pi is in itself addictive, but even in its raw form it does the job well.
Before finding pi I had written a lot of custom stuff on top of all the provider specific CLI tools (codex, Claude, cursor-agent, Gemini) - but now I don’t have to anymore (except if I want to use my anthropic sub, which I will now cancel for that exact reason)
Same.
Pi is refreshingly minimal in terms of system prompts, but still works really well and that makes me wonder whether other harnesses are overdoing. Look at OpenCode's prompts, for instance - long, mostly based on feels and IMO unnecessary. I would've liked to just overwrite OC's system prompts with Pi's (to get other features that Pi doesn't have) but that isn't possible today (without maintaining a custom fork)
Why most of those tools are written in js/ts?
JS is not something that was developed with CLI in mind and on top of that that language does not lend itself to be good for LLM generation as it has pretty weak validation compared to e.g. Rust, or event C, even python.
Not to mention memory usage or performance.
For a TUI agent, runtime performance is not the bottleneck, not by far. Hackability is the USP. Pi has extensions hotreloading which comes almost for free with jiti. The fact that the source is the shipped artifact (unlike Go/Rust) also helps the agent seeing its own code and the ability to write and load its own extensions based on that. A fact that OpenClaw’s success is in part based on IMO.
I can’t find the tweet from Mario (the author), but he prefers the Typescript/npm ecosystem for non-performance critical systems because it hits a sweet spot for him. I admire his work and he’s a real polyglot, so I tend to think he has done his homework. You’ll find pi memory usage quite low btw.
Pi is a great project, and the lightweight Agent development is really recommended to refer to Pi's implementation method.
Same.
I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to say this, but OpenCode feels like an open source Claude Code, while pi feels like an open source coding agent.
Pi is good stuff and refreshingly simple and malleable.
I used it recently inside a CI workflow in GitLab to automatically create ChangeLog.md entries for commits. That + Qwen 3.5 has been pretty successful. The job starts up Pi programatically, points it at the commits in question, and tells it to explore and get all the context it needs within 600 seconds... and it works. I love that this is possible.
I’ve been extraordinarily productive with this, their $10 Go plan, and a rigorous spec-driven workflow. Haven’t touched Claude in 2 months.
I sprinkle in some billed API usage to power my task-planner and reviewer subagents (both use GPT 5.4 now).
The ability to switch models is very useful and a great learning experience. GLM, Kimi and their free models surprised me. Not the best, not perfect, but still very productive. I would be a wary shareholder if I owned a stake in the frontier labs… that moat seems to be shrinking fast.
> Moat seems to be shrinking fast.
It's been a moving target for years at this point.
Both open and closed source models have been getting better, but not sure if the open source models have really been closing the gap since DeepSeek R1.
But yes: If the top closed source models were to stop getting better today, it wouldn't take long for open source to catch up.
Can you talk more about how you leverage higher quality models for the stuff that counts? Anywhere I can read more on the philosophy of when to use each?
Sure happy to share. It’s been trial and error, but I’ve learned that for agents to reliably ship a large feature or refactor, I need a good spec (functional acceptance criteria) and I need a good plan for sequencing the work.
The big expensive models are great at planning tasks and reviewing the implementation of a task. They can better spot potential gotchas, performance or security gaps, subtle logic and nuance that cheaper models fail to notice.
The small cheap models are actually great (and fast) at generating decent code if they have the right direction up front.
So I do all the spec writing myself (with some LLM assistance), and I hand it to a Supervisor agent who coordinates between subagents. Plan -> implement -> review -> repeat until the planner says “all done”.
I switch up my models all the time (actively experimenting) but today I was using GPT 5.4 for review and planning, costing me about $0.4-$1 for a good sized task, and Kimi for implementation. Sometimes my spec takes 4-5 review loops and the cost can add up over an 8 hour day. Still cheaper than Claude Max (for now, barely).
Each agent retains a fairly small context window which seems to keep costs down and improves output. Full context can be catastrophic for some models.
As for the spec writing, this is the fun part for me, and I’ve been obsessing over this process, and the process of tracking acceptance criteria and keeping my agents aligned to it. I have a toolkit cooking, you can find in my comment history (aiming to open source it this week).
How are you managing context?
I'm building a full stack web app, simple but with real API integrations with CC.
Moving so fast that I can barely keep a hold on what I'm testing and building at the same time, just using Sonnet. It's not bad at all. A lot of the specs develop as I'm testing the features, either as an immediate or a todo / gh issue.
How can you manage an agentic flow?
I wrote something about that: https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
The moat is having researchers that can produce frontier models. When OpenCode starts building frontier models, then I'd be worried; otherwise they're just another wrapper
Of course, my point is that these trailing models are close behind, and cost me a lot less, and work great with harnesses like OpenCode.
"OpenCode Go" (a subscription) lets you use lots of hosted open-weights frontier AI models, such as GLM-5 (currently right up there in the frontier model leaderboards) for $10 per month.
Stupid question, but are there models worth using that specialize in a particular programming language? For instance, I'd love to be able to run a local model on my GPU that is specific to C/C++ or Python. If such a thing exists, is it worth it vs one of the cloud-based frontier models?
I'm guessing that a model which only covers a single language might be more compact and efficient vs a model trained across many languages and non-programming data.
I'm currently experimenting with (trying to) fine tune Qwen3.5 to make it better at a given language (Nim in this case); but I am quite bad at this, and honestly am unsure if it's even really fully feasible at the scale I have access to. Certainly been fun so far though, and I have a little Asus GX10 box on the way to experiment some more!
I'd be interested in this too. I think that's what post-training can achieve but I've never looked into it.
I don't use it for coding but as an agent backend. Maybe opencode was thought for coding mainly, but for me, it's incredibly good as an agent, especially when paired with skills, a fastapi server, and opencode go(minimax) is just so much intelligence at an incredibly cheap price. Plus, you can talk to it via channels if you use a claw.
By "agent" you mean what?
Coding is mostly "agentic" so I'm bit puzzled.
I'd really like to get more clarification on offline mode and privacy. The github issues related to privacy did not leave a good feeling, despite being initially excited. Is offline mode a thing yet? I want to use this, but I don't want my code to leave my device.
Related https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416
Have they "squatted" the name? It's the same name for the digital Sovereignty initiative in Germany
https://opencode.de/
you'll be surprised the name was actually a controversy on x/twitter since opencode was originally another dev's idea who joined the charmcli team. they wanted to keep that name but dax somehow (?) ended up squatting it. the charmcli team has renamed their tool to "crush" which matches their other tools a lot better than "opencode"
i've been using this as my primary harness for llama.cpp models, Claude, and Gemini for a few months now. the LSP integration is great. i also built a plugin to enable a very minimal OpenClaw alternative as a self modifying hook system over IPC as a plugin for OpenCode: https://github.com/khimaros/opencode-evolve -- and here's a deployment ready example making use of it which runs in an Incus container/VM: https://github.com/khimaros/persona
Very cool! I have been using opencode, as almost everybody else in the lab is using codex. I found the tools thing inside your own repo amazing but somehow I could not get it to reliably get opencode to write its own tools. Seems also a bit scary as there is pretty much not much security by default. I am using it in a NixOS WSL2 VM
What would be the advantage using this over say VSCode with Copilot or Roo Code? I need to make some time to compare, but just curious if others have a good insight on things.
In terms of output, it's comparable. In terms of workflow, it suits my needs a lot more as a VIM terminal user.
I started out using VSCode with their Claude plugin; it seemed like a totally unnecessary integration. A better workflow seems to just run Claude Code directly on my machine where there are fewer restrictions - it just opens a lot more possibilities on what it can do
Aren’t those in-editor tools? Opencode is a CLI
Ok I get it now, same with the vim comment above, it seems VSCode has the more IDE setup while OpenCode is giving the vim nerdtree vibe? I'll have to take a look, it makes sense to possibly have both for different use cases I guess.
I started my own fully containerized coding agent 100% in Go recently. Looking for testers: https://github.com/aduermael/herm
i like the containerization idea. i wish you used the opencode cli as the actual underlying agent.
What do you like particularly about the opencode cli?
I wish they would add back support for anthropic max/pro plans via calling the claude cli in -p mode. As I understand thats still very much allowed usage of claude code cli (as you are still using claude cli as it was intended anyway and fixes the issue of cache hits which I believe were the primary reason anthropic sent them the c&d). I love the UX from OpenCode (I loved setting it up in web mode on my home server and code from the web browser vs doing claude code over ssh) but until I can use my pro/max subscription I can't go back, the API pricing is way too much for my third world country wallet.
This replaced Aider for me a couple months back.
I use it with Qwen 3.5 running locally when my daily limits run out on my other subscriptions.
The harness is great. Local models are just slow enough that the subscription models are easier to use. For most of my tasks these days, the model's capability is sufficient; it is just not as snappy.
One thing I like with Aider is the fact that I can control the context by using /add explicitly on a subset of files. Can you achieve the same wit OpenCode ?
I feel like I haven't really needed to manage context with newer models. Rarely I will restart the session to clear out out.
I'm curious: I'venever touched cloud models beyond a few seconds. I run a AMD395+ with the new qwen coder. Is there any intelligence difference, or is it just speed and context? At 128GB, it takes quite awhile before getting context wall.
There's a difference in intelligence. However for 90% of what I'm doing I don't really need it. The online models are just faster.
I just did a one hour vibe session today, ripping out a library dependency and replacing it with another and pushing the library to pypi. I should take my task list and let the local model replicate the work and see how it works out.
Can someone explain how Claude Code can instantly determine what file I have open and what lines I have selected in VS Code even if it's just running in a VS Code terminal instance, yet I cannot for the life of me get OpenCode to come anywhere close to that same experience?
The OpenCode docs suggest its possible, but it only works with their extension (not in an already open VS Code terminal) with a very specific keyboard shortcut and only barely at that.
I‘m a big fan of OpenCode. I’m mostly using it via https://github.com/prokube/pk-opencode-webui which I built with my colleague (using OpenCode).
I tried to use it but OpenCode won't even open for me on Wayland (Ubuntu 24.04), whichever terminal emulator I use. I wasn't even aware TUI could have compatibility issues with Wayland
> I wasn't even aware TUI could have compatibility issues with Wayland
They shouldn't, as long as your terminal emulator doesn't. Why do you think it's Wayland related?
Strange. I've been running it on several different ubuntu 24 04 machines with standard terminal with no issues.
This shouldn't be related to Wayland.
It works perfectly fine on Niri, Hyprland and other Wayland WMs.
What problem do you have?
Blank screen, and it's referenced in the official docs as potentially a Wayland issue https://opencode.ai/docs/troubleshooting/#linux-wayland--x11...
I didn't dig further
Seems like there's many github issues about this actually
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/14336
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/14636
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/14335
I've run into that issue while developing https://soloterm.com.
If you respond twice to their theme query probes, the whole thing bricks. Or if you're slightly out of order. It's very delicate.
Definitely not Wayland related, or so I doubt. I'm on wayland and never had any issues, and it's a TUI, where the terminal emulator does or does not do GPU work. What led you to that conclusion?
This issue: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/9505
And then the official docs: https://opencode.ai/docs/troubleshooting/#linux-wayland--x11...
> Linux: Wayland / X11 issues
> On Linux, some Wayland setups can cause blank windows or compositor errors.
> If you’re on Wayland and the app is blank/crashing, try launching with OC_ALLOW_WAYLAND=1.
> If that makes things worse, remove it and try launching under an X11 session instead.
OC_ALLOW_WAYLAND=1 didn't work for me (Ubuntu 24.04)
Suggesting to use a different display server to use a TUI (!!) seems a bit wild to me. I didn't put a lot of time into investigating this so maybe there is another reason than Wayland. Anyway I'm using Pi now
There's a desktop app which uses Tauri. Unrelated to the TUI.
That is wild. Thanks for the info.
Probably vibe coded
Some of the more recent versions of it had memory leaks so you couldn't just leave it on in the background
I’ve been having a very good experience with OpenCode and Kimi 2.5. It’s fast enough and smart enough that I can stay in a state of flow.
Open Code has been the backbone of our entire operation (we used Claude Code before it, and Cursor before that).
Hugely grateful for what they do.
What caused the switch? Also, are you still trying to use Claude models in OpenCode?
Yes I regularly plan in Opus 4.6 and execute in “lesser” models ie MiniMax
You can access anthropic models with subscription pricing via a copilot license.
Pretty sure that's against TOS.
Edit: it's not. https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
They must be eating insane amounts of $$$ for this. I wouldn't expect it to last
No, Claude on GitHub Copilot is billed at 3X the usage rate of the other models e.g. GPT-5.4 and you get an extremely truncated context window.
See https://models.dev for a comparison against the normal "vanilla" API.
I use this. I run it in a sandbox[0]. I run it inside Emacs vterm so it's really quick for me to jump back and forth between this and magit, which I use to review what it's done.
I really should look into more "native" Emacs options as I find using vterm a bit of a clunky hack. But I'm just not that excited about this stuff right now. I use it because I'm lazy, that's all. Right now I'm actually getting into woodwork.
[0] https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/ai-agent-sandbox/
Being able to assign different models to subagents is the feature I've been wanting. I use Claude Code daily and burning the same expensive model on simple file lookups hurts. Any way to set default model routing rules, or is it manual per task?
With OpenCode, I've found that I can do this by defining agents, assigning each agent a specifically model to use. Then K manually flip to that agent when I want it or define some might rules in my global AGENTS.nd file to gives some direction and OpenCode will automatically subtask out to the agent, which then forces the use of the defined model.
The reason I'm switching again next month, from Claude back to OpenAI.
Yeah, support the company that promised to help your government illegally mass surveil and mass kill people, because they support a use case slightly better than the non-mass-murdering option.
Both of them promised to help their government illegally mass surveil and mass kill people. One of them just didn't want it done to US citizens.
I'm not a US citizen, so both companies are the same, as far as I'm concerned.
You are absolutely correct that both are evil ... as are most corporations.
Still, I feel like "will commit illegal mass murder against their own citizens" is a significant enough degree more evil. I think lots of corporations will help their government murder citizens of other countries, but very few would go so far as to agree to murder their own (fellow) citizens ... just to get a juicy contract.
I see your viewpoint but, to me, "both will happily murder you but one is better because they won't murder ME!" isn't very compelling. Like, I get it, but also it changes nothing for me. They're both bad.
It's not about "won't murder me" it's about "won't murder their own tribe". Humans are very tribal creatures, and we have all sorts of built-in societal taboos about betraying our tribe.
We also have taboos against betraying/murdering/whatever people of other tribes, but those taboos are much weaker and get relaxed sometimes (eg. in war). My point is, it takes significantly more anti-social (ie. evil) behavior to betray your own tribe, in the deepest way possible, than it does to do horrible things to other tribes.
This is just as much true for Russians murdering Ukranians as Ukranians murdering Russians, or any other conflict group: almost all Russians would consider a Russian who helps kill Russians to be more evil than a Russian who kills Ukranians (and vice versa).
Right, but I consider someone who'll murder exclusively other tribes to be infinitely closer to someone who'll murder their own tribe than to someone who won't murder anyone.
watching trump get elected twice; you can see why americanos have no problemos with mental backflips when choosing.
But you're still choosing evil when you could try local models
Will you send me an H100?
Are you doing something that actually demands it? Have you tried local models on either the mac or AMD395+?
I will be able to do something that demands it once I have it ;)
Will you send me an AMD395+ or a new Mac that can handle the local models? That would probably be enough for me.
> mass kill people
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
You're right, Anthropic shouldn't have even taken a moral stance here at all. They should have just gone full send and allowed everything, because there will never be satisfying some people. Why even try?
OpenCode is an awesome tool.
Many folks from other tools are only getting exposed to the same functionality they got used to, but it offers much more than other harnesses, especially for remote coding.
You can start a service via `opencode serve`, it can be accessed from anywhere and has great experience on mobile except a few bugs. It's a really good way to work with your agents remotely, goes really well with TailScale.
The WebUI that they have can connect to multiple OpenCode backends at once, so you may use multiple VPS-es for various projects you have and control all of them from a single place.
Lastly, there's a desktop app, but TBH I find it redundant when WebUI has everything needed.
Make no mistakes though, it's not a perfect tool, my gripes with it:
- There are random bugs with loading/restoring state of the session
- Model/Provider selection switch across sessions/projects is often annoying
- I had a bug making Sonnet/Opus unusable from mobile phone because phone's clock was 150ms ahead of laptop's (ID generation)
- Sometimes agent get randomly stuck. It especially sucks for long/nested sessions
- WebUI on laptop just completely forgot all the projects at one day
- `opencode serve` doesn't pick up new skills automatically, it needs to be restarted
If you are doing data engineering, there is a specific fork of Open Code with an agentic harness for data tasks: https://github.com/AltimateAI/altimate-code
The MCP (Model Context Protocol) support is what makes this interesting to me. Most coding agents treat the file system and shell as the only surfaces — MCP opens up the possibility of connecting to any structured data source or API as a first-class tool without custom integration work each time.
Curious how the context window management works in practice. With large repos, the "what files to include" problem tends to dominate — does it have a strategy beyond embedding-based retrieval, or is that the main approach here?
Anecdotal pros and one annoyance:
- GH copilot API is a first class citizen with access to multiple providers’ models at a very good price with a pro plan - no terminal flicker - it seems really good with subagents - I can’t see any terminal history inside my emacs vterm :(
Geminis cli is clearly a fork of it btw
I've been using opencode for months with codex. best combo I've tried so far
OpenX is becoming a bit like that hindu symbol associated with well being..
For some reason opencode does not have option to disable streaming http client, which renders some inference providers unavailable...
There's also a request and a PR to add such option but it was closed due to "not adhering to community standards"
I had been using open code and admire they effort to create something huge and help a lot of developers around the world, connecting LLM our daily work without use a browser!
One thing that makes coding agents really useful is structured data access via MCP servers. Instead of the agent trying to scrape a webpage to understand your project's context, you give it a direct API to query structured data from 9+ sources (GitHub repos, Stack Overflow questions, arXiv papers, npm packages).
The biggest bottleneck I've seen isn't the coding — it's the agent not having enough context about the ecosystem it's working in.
thanks for chiming in with this noise bot
I haven't been able to successfully get their CLI to reliably edit files when using local models, anybody else having the same problem?
Can anyone clarify how this compares with Aider?
Does it support hybrid models, for e.g deep research by Model 1 vs faster response from Model2
Yes
I reach for OpenCode + Kimi to save tokens on lower priority stuff and because it's quite fast on Fireworks AI.
I'm 90% sure Fireworks serves up quantized models.
The maintaining team is incredibly petty though. Tantrums when they weren't allowed to abuse Claude subscriptions and had to use the API instead. They just removed API support entirely.
> we did our best to convince anthropic to support developer choice but they sent lawyers
https://x.com/i/status/2034730036759339100
Agree, I find it hard to support them when the team is so obnoxious on X.
Love opencode!
Why is this upvoted again on hacker news this is an old thing
Because this site is basically dead for any other subject than vibecoding and AI agents.
Claude Code subscription is still usable, but requires plugin like https://github.com/griffinmartin/opencode-claude-auth
Or just don't abuse the subscription and use the API instead.
Sure but will you get banned by anthropic anyway?
I personally like this better than claude code
Things that make an an OpenCode fanboy 1. OpenCode source code is even more awesome. I have learned so much from the way they have organized tools, agents, settings and prompts. 2. models.dev is an amazing free resource of LLM endpoints these guys have put together 3. OpenCode Zen almost always has a FREE coding model that you can use for all kinds of work. I recently used the free tier to organize and rename all my documents.
The fact that I wasn’t able to link llama.cpp server locally without fuss kinda beats the whole open point. Open for proprietary APIs only?
I’m happy with the one I built. (ZDX)
Do they have any sandbox out of the box?
nope - most folks wrap it in nono: https://nono.sh/docs/cli/clients/opencode
Honestly I was a Claude code only guy for a while. I switched to opencode and I’m not going back.
IMO, the web UI is a killer feature - it’s got just enough to be an agent manager - without any fluff. I run it on my remote VMs and connect over HTTP.
I feel like Anthropic really need to fork this for Claude Code or something. The render bugs in Claude Code drive me nuts.
OpenCode feels like the “open-source Copilot agent” moment the more control, hackability, and no black-box lock-in.
OpenCode vs Aider vs Crush?
OpenCode, by reason of plugins alone, is better than all of them.
opus/sonnet 4.6 can be used in opencode with a github copilot subscription
Does github copilot ToS allow this?
They officially support OpenCode: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
This is very interesting. This could allow custom harnesses to be used economically with Opus. Depending on the usage limits, this may be cheaper than their API.
I don't see why not. It's just using the Github Copilot API.
For open models with limited context, Swival works really well: https://swival.dev
isn't this the one with default-on need code change to turn off telemetry?
No
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/5554
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencod...
?
You can scroll down literally two messages in the Github issue you linked:
> there isnt any telemetry, the open telemetry thing is if you want to get spans like the ai sdk has spans to track tokens and stuff but we dont send them anywhere and they arent enabled either
> most likely these requests are for models.dev (our models api which allows us to update the models list without needing new releases)
You should really look at the 2nd link, its much worse than telemetry..
> opencode will proxy all requests internally to https://app.opencode.ai
> There is currently no option to change this behavior, no startup flag, nothing. You do not have the option to serve the web app locally, using `opencode web` just automatically opens the browser with the proxied web app, not a true locally served UI.
> https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/4d7cbdcbef92bb696...
If I wanted to switch from Claude Code to this - what openai model is comparable to opus 4.6? And is it the same speed or slower/faster? Thank you!
GPT 5.4 has been the winner this week. Last week Opus 4.6. You can use both in OpenCode.
5.4 kind of falls apart in big/large projects.
How does it compare to using GPT 5.4 inside Codex?
I used Codex for a long time. It's definitely better than Claude Code due to being open source, but opencode is nicer to use. Good hotkeys, plan/build modes, fast and easy model switching, good mcp support. Supports skills, is not the fastest but good enough.
Well not anymore with Claude pro…
It is "not supported" for two month at this point, yet somehow opencode + claude max is still my main workflow today
If you want faster, anything running on a Cerebras machine will do.
Never tried it for much coding though.
Outside of their (hard to buy) GLM 4.7 coding plans, it's also extremely expensive.
do you care about harness benchmarks or no?
Just a data point, I would need to use it for my workflows. I do have a monorepo with a root level claude.md, and project level claude.md files for backend/frontend.
I started with Codex, then switched to OpenCode, then switched to Codex.
OpenCode just has more bugs, it's incredibly derivative so it doesn't really do anything else than Codex.
The advantage of OpenCode is that it can use any underlying model, but that's a disadvantage because it breaks the native integration. If you use Opus + Claude Code, or Gpt-Codex + Codex App, you are using it the way it was designed to be used.
If you don't actually use different models, or plan to switch, or somehow value vendor neutrality strategically, you are paying a large cost without much reward.
This is in general a rule, vendor neutrality is often seen as a generic positive, but it is actually a tradeoff. If you just build on top of AWS for example, you make use of it's features and build much faster and simpler than if you use Terraform.
You do not "write" code. Stop these euphemisms. It is an intellectual prosthetic for feeble minded people that plagiarizes code by written by others. And it connects to the currently "free" providers who own the means of plagiarizing.
There is nothing open about it. Please do not abuse the term "open" like in OpenBSD.
nice
minus Claude login
If you have to post something like this line already loser the plot
I only boot my windows 11 gaming machine for drm games that don’t work with proton. Otherwise it’s hot garbage
I fucking love OpenCode.
What I don't understand is that, if coding agents are making coding obsolete, why do these vibe coders not choose a language that doesn't set their users' compute resources on fire? Just vibe rust or golang for their cli tools, no one reviews code slop nowadays anyway /s.
I do not understand the insistence on using JavaScript for command line tools. I don't use rust at all, but if I'm making a vibe coded cli I'm picking rust or golang. Not zig because coding agents can't handle the breaking changes. What better test of agentic coders' conviction in their belief in AI than to vibe a language they can't read.
Just remember, OpenCode is sending telemetry to their own servers, even when you're using your own locally hosted models. There are no environment variables, flags, or other configuration options to disable this behavior.¹
At least you can easily turn off telemetry in Claude Code - just set CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC to 1.
You can use Claude Code with llama.cpp and vLLM, too right out of the box with no additional software necessary, just point ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL at your inference server of choice, with any value in ANTHROPIC_API_KEY.
Some people think that Anthropic could disable this at any time, but that's not really true - you can disable automatic updates and back up and reuse native Claude Code binaries, ensuring Anthropic cannot change your existing local Claude Code binary's behavior.
With that said, I like the idea of an open source TUI agent that won't spy on me without my consent and no way to disable it much better than a closed source TUI agent that I can effectively neuter telemetry on, but sadly, OpenCode is not the former. It's just another piece of VC-funded spyware that's destined for enshittification.
¹https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/4d7cbdcbef92bb696...
Are you sure that endpoint is sending all traffic to opencode? I'm not familiar with Hono but it looks like a catch all route if none of the above match and is used to serve the front-end web interface?
You are correct, it is indeed a route for the web interface
updated post accordingly
That linked code is not used by the opencode agent instance though right? Looks related to their web server?
They don't. That is just the route for their WebUI, which is completely optional.
I've point thought about making things that just send garbage to any data collecting service.
You'd be surprised how useless datasets become with like 10% garbage data when you don't know which data is garbage
Does opencode still work if you blackhole the telemetry?
this is a big red flag
Sadly Antropic have blocked the usage of claude on it.
No, they haven’t. You can use claude like any other model via API, you just can’t reuse your subscription token.
There’s plenty of options to get around that.
This is extremely cool; will download now and check it out. Thank you!