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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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 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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
The topic at hand seems to shift the quality of the discussion greatly these days. Many people have thoughts on coding agents because they are aimed at the lower quartiles of coders. Far less have detailed opinions on other ways they could wield a Markov model.
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 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.
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
(Ok, technically o1-pro is even more expensive, but I'm assuming that's a "please move on" pricing)
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.
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.
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.
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.
API = way more expensive, allowed to use on your terms without anthropic hindering you.
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.
I'd rather switch to OpenAI than give up my favorite harness.
https://www.youtube.com/live/z0JYVTAqeQM?si=oLvyLlZiFLTxL7p0
Hugely grateful for what they do.
They shouldn't, as long as your terminal emulator doesn't. Why do you think it's Wayland related?
It works perfectly fine on Niri, Hyprland and other Wayland WMs.
What problem do you have?
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.
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 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.
There's also a request and a PR to add such option but it was closed due to "not adhering to community standards"
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
I'm not a US citizen, so both companies are the same, as far as I'm concerned.
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.
But you're still choosing evil when you could try local models
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencod...
?
> 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)
Never tried it for much coding though.
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...
You'd be surprised how useless datasets become with like 10% garbage data when you don't know which data is garbage