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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 codin

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.

blks 7mo ago
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.
- logicprog 7mo ago
  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.
  - jeremyjh 7mo ago
    > I think they're just somewhat irresponsible devs. Before coding agents it took quite a lot more experience before most people could develop and ship a successful product. The average years of experience of both core team and contributors was higher and this reflected in product and architecture choices that really have an impact, especially on non-functional requirements. They could have had better design and architecture in this project if they had asked the AI for more help with it, but they did not even know what to ask or how to validate the responses. Of course, lots of devs with more years of experience would do just as badly or worse. What we are seeing here though is a filter removed that means a lot of projects now are the first real product everyone the team has ever developed.
paustint 7mo ago
I recently listened to this episode from the Claude Code creator (here is the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4 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?
- logicprog 7mo ago
  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!
- causal 7mo ago
  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.
  - mattmanser 7mo ago
    I feel like our industry goes through these phases where there's an obvious thought leader that everyone's copying because they are revolutionary. Like Rails/DHH was one phase, Git/GitHub another. And right now it's kinda Claude Code. But they're so obviously really bad at development that it feels like a MLM scam. I'm just describing the feeling I'm getting, perhaps badly. I use Claude, I recommended Claude for the company I worked at. But by god they're bloody awful at development. It feels like the point where someone else steps in with a rock solid, dependable, competitor and then everyone forgets Claude Code ever existed.
westoque 7mo ago
> 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.
- siddboots 7mo ago
  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.
  - girvo 7mo ago
    > 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.
    - staticassertion 7mo ago
      > our constant claims that quality and security matter I'm 13 years into this industry, this is the first I'm hearing of this.
      - usagisushi 7mo ago
        I’ve heard the "S" in IoT stands for Security.
cpeterso 7mo ago
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 https://x.com/thdxr/status/2031377117007454421
- logicprog 7mo ago
  Well that's good to hear, maybe they'll improve moving forward on the release aspect at least.
- rdedev 7mo ago
  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
  - alansaber 7mo ago
    Not terrible if they proactively depricate slop features
- j45 7mo ago
  What to release > What to build > Build anything faster
rbehrends 7mo ago
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 https://opencode.ai/docs/config/#precedence-order [2] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10939 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10939
- TZubiri 7mo ago
  I assign a specific user for it, which doesn't have much access to my files. So what I want is complete autonomy.
- woctordho 7mo ago
  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.
  - mrln 7mo ago
    No, it is still configurable. You can specify in your opencode.json config that it should be able to run everything. I think they just argued that it shouldn't be the default. Which I agree with.
    - indigodaddy 7mo ago
      And in the webui there is a don't ask button
    - rbehrends 7mo ago
      No, the problem is that when logging in, the provider's website can provide an authentication shell command that OpenCode will send to the shell sight unseen, even if it is "rm -rf /home". This "feature" is completely unnecessary for the agent to function as an agent, or even for authentication. It's not about it being the default, it's about it being there at all and being designed that way.
bakugo 7mo ago
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.
- logicprog 7mo ago
  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.
foobarqux 7mo ago
What is a better option?
- logicprog 7mo ago
  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.
  - mmcclure 7mo ago
    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/coding-agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
- andreynering 7mo ago
  https://charm.land/crush https://charm.land/crush
  - rao-v 7mo ago
    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?
    - andreynering 7mo ago
      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.
thatmf 7mo ago
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.
- Aperocky 7mo ago
  negative values even.
- rounce 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - openclaw01 7mo ago
    [dead]
arcanemachiner 7mo ago
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/opencode_concerns_not_truely_local/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencod... [1] https://github.com/standardnguyen/rolandcode https://github.com/standardnguyen/rolandcode
- nikcub 7mo ago
  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)
  - drdaeman 7mo ago
    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
- nsonha 7mo ago
  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
  - ipaddr 7mo ago
    Or by testing it themselves.
    - nsonha 6mo ago
      yes testing is the alternative to observability... in an alternative universe
  - 7mo ago
tshaddox 7mo ago
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.
- hboon 7mo ago
  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)
- Darkmoon_UK 7mo ago
  Currently on the hunt for OpenCode alternatives as it's become disastrously unstable in recent weeks between SSE timeout issues, broken Desktop UI and a very, very unhealthy looking GitHub PR queue, I'm out. Since I'm on a Kotlin stack, Junie CLI in ACP server mode is looking attractive.
zackify 7mo ago
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
- tmatsuzaki 7mo ago
  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.
grapheneposter 7mo ago
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.
scuff3d 7mo ago
Drives me nuts that we have TUIs written in friggin TS now. That being said, I do prefer OpenCode to Codex and Claude Code.
- cies 7mo ago
  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?)
  - scuff3d 7mo ago
    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.
  - esafak 7mo ago
    I find it more configurable, for defining (sub)agent abilities, plugins, and different models/providers, of course.
alienbaby 7mo ago
its hard not to wonder if they are taking their own medicine, but not quite properly
nico 7mo ago
> 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
- ctxc 7mo ago
  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
  - lanyard-textile 7mo ago
    I've never gotten that message?
  - auggierose 7mo ago
    I think it goes away if you actually use the native installer ...
    - nico 7mo ago
      The hombrew version doesn’t say anything about the native installer, but still bugs you to update after every minor version (which is every day, sometimes multiple times per day) The npm version tells you there’s a native installer and to use it instead The native installer never says anything. Not sure how it gets updated
fHr 7mo ago
Rust > TS Codex > OpenCode
namlem 7mo ago
How much of the development is being done by humans?
plastic3169 7mo ago
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.
- msh 7mo ago
  I don’t think good TUI’s are the same as good command line programs. Great tui apps would to me be things like Norton/midnight commander, borlands turbo pascal, vim, eMacs and things like that
  - plastic3169 7mo ago
    Yes cli and tui are not the same, but I expect TUI to work decent in general terminal emulator and not acitvely block copying and pasting. Having to install supported terminal emulator goes against the vibe.
- frumiousirc 7mo ago
  > Copy paste is hijacked FWIW, in Kitty on Linux, SHIFT + mouse-select copies and SHIFT + middle-mouse-button pastes. This use of SHIFT and otherwise using standard Unix style copy/paste is common in a lot of TUIs (eg, weechat).
sorentwo 7mo ago
The moment that OpenCode, after helping fix a Dockerfile issue, decided it was time to deploy to prod without asking for consent, I was out.
- brabel 7mo ago
  You must never rely on AI itself for authorization… don’t let it run on an environment where it can do that. I can’t believe this needs to be said but everyone seems to have lost their mind and decided to give all their permissions away to a non deterministic thing that when prompted correctly will send it all out to whoever asks it nicely.
jruz 7mo ago
yeah I agree is way too buggy, nice tho and I appreciate the effort but really feels sloppy
Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
I tried running Opencode on my 7$/yr 512mb vps but it had the OOM issue and yes it needs 1GB of ram or more. I then tried running other options like picoclaw/picocode etc but they were all really hard to manage/create The UI/UX I want is that I can just put my free openrouter api key in and then I am ready to go to get access to free models like Arcee AI right now After reading your comments/I read this thread, I tried crush by charmbracelet again and it gives the UI/UX that I want. I am definitely impressed by crush/ the charm team. They are on HN and they work great for me, highly recommended if you want something which can work on low constrained devices I do feel like Charm's TUI's are too beautiful in the sense that running a connection over SSH can delay so when I tried to copy some things, the delay made things less copy-able but overall, I think that I am using Crush and I am happy for the most part :-) Edit: That being said, just as I was typing this, Crush took all the Free requests from Openrouter that I get for free so it might be a bit of minor issue but overall its not much of an issue from Crush side, so still overall, my point is that Crush is worth checking out Kudos to the CharmBracelet team for making awesome golang applications!
jmmv 7mo ago
> and (partly as a result) it's fairly resource inefficient (often uses 1GB of RAM or more. For a TUI). That's (one of the reasons) why I'm favoring Codex over Claude Code. Claude Code is an... Electron app (for a TUI? WTH?) and Codex is Rust. The difference is tangible: the former feels sluggish and does some odd redrawing when the terminal size changes, while the latter definitely feels more snappy to me (leaving aside that GPT's responses also seem more concise). At some point, I had both chewing concurrently on the same machine and same project, and Claude Code was using multiple GBs of RAM and 100% CPU whereas Codex was happy with 80 MB and 6%. Performance _is_ a feature and I'm afraid the amounts of code AI produces without supervision lead to an amount of bloat we haven't seen before...
- RagnarD 7mo ago
  Totally agree. I'm baffled by those who don't clearly see that Codex works better than C.C. in many ways.
  - Aeolun 7mo ago
    Codex being faster is not at all equivalent to working better. Claude Code does what I need from it most of the time.
    - RagnarD 7mo ago
      I said better, not faster. Primarily, it writes better code, works more smoothly, is better at describing what it's doing and what it's done.
      - Aeolun 7mo ago
        Well, yes, but it was in response to a post mostly waxing lyrical about using rust instead of typescript, so forgive me if I got the wrong impression. Also, that is so far outside my experience that I can’t tell if you are joking. Codex seems to always do exactly what I ask of it, nothing more, and nothing less, and with as many shortcuts as possible.
- 7mo ago
vrganj 7mo ago
[dead]
mihaaly 7mo ago
I tried it briefly and the practice - argued for strategy for operation actually - to override my working folder seelction and altering to the parent root git folder is a no go.
bjackman 7mo ago
That is very disappointing coz I've been wanting to try an alternative to Gemini CLI for exactly these reasons. The AI is great but the actual software is a buggy, slow, bloated blob of TypeScript (on a custom Node runtime IIUC!) that I really hate running. It takes multiple seconds to start, requires restarting to apply settings, constantly fucks up the terminal, often crashes due to JS heap overflows, doesn't respect my home dir (~/.gemini? Come on folks are we serious?), has an utterly unusable permission system, etc etc. Yet they had plenty of energy to inject silly terminal graphics and have dumb jokes and tips scroll across the screen. Is Claude Code like this too? I wonder if Pi is any better. A big downside would be paying actual cost price for tokens but on the other hand, I wouldn't be tied to Google's model backend which is also extremely flaky and unable to meet demand a lot of the time. If I could get real work done with open models (no idea if that's the case yet) and switch providers when a given provider falls over, that would be great.
- knocte 7mo ago
  > Is Claude Code like this too? I wonder if Pi is any better. I'm very happy with Pi myself (running it on a small VPS so that I don't need to do sandboxing shenanigans).
- plagiarist 7mo ago
  Claude will also happily write a huge pile of junk into your home directory, I am sad to report. The permissions are idiotic as well, but I always use it in a container anyway. But I have not had it crash and it hasn't been slow starting for me.
- badlogic 7mo ago
  you can use subscriptions with pi.
- WhyNotHugo 7mo ago
  I use Pi with Aliyun, which cost a flat ¥40 (~€5) per month for GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, Minmax and a few other models. Honestly, these models seem quite on par with Claude. Some days they seem slightly worse, some days I can't tell the difference. AFAIK, the usage quota is comparable to the Claude $200 subscription.
horsh1 7mo ago
You are describing a typical state of a wibecoded project.
darepublic 7mo ago
Why not just code your own agent harness
AppleAtCha 7mo ago
Is there a name for these types of "overbearing" and visually busy "TUIs"? It seems like all the other agents have the same aesthetic and it is unlike traditional nurses or plain text interfaces in a bad way IMO. The constant spinners, sidebars and needless margins are a nuisance to me. Especially over an ssh connection in a tmux session it feels wrong.
rco8786 7mo ago
> they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace. I wonder how much of this is because the maintainers are using OpenCode to vibe the code for OpenCode.
wvlia5 7mo ago
this is a bot comment
stego-tech 7mo ago
This is why I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to these tools on HN myself. My month with Claude Code (the TUI, not the GUI) was amazing from an IT POV, just slop-generating niche tools I could quickly implement and audit (not giant-ass projects), but I ain't outsourcing that to another company when Qwen et al are right there for running on my M1 Pro or RTX 3090. I'm looking forward to more folks building these kinds of tools with a stronger focus on portability via API or loading local models, as means of having a genuinely useful assistant or co-programmer rather than paying some big corp way too much money (and letting them use my data) for roughly the same experience.
- 627467 7mo ago
  Curious about your setup of qwen on m1 pro. Care to share the toolkit?
- plagiarist 7mo ago
  Do you have a setup with a local Qwen that can write out niche tools pretty well? I have been curious about how much I could do local.
- jazzypants 7mo ago
  The types of models you can run locally on that hardware are toys in comparison to the foundation models
theshrike79 7mo ago
I’ve pretty much ended up with a pi.dev+gpt-5 and Claude combo. Sometimes I use GLM with Pi if I run out of quota or need some simple changes. I tried Opencode but it was just too much? Same with Crush, 10/10 pretty but lacking in features I need. LSP support was cool though.
- dopidopHN2 7mo ago
  Can you expands on the cool part of LSP support ? I"m curious and "on paper" it sounds desirable but I'm unclear on the pluses
  - theshrike79 7mo ago
    In theory it should give the LLM better tools to explore and edit the code. So instead of working with the code as text, it's a tree of stuff it can read and edit. I don't know how much it works in practice though.
mmaunder 7mo ago
Yeah just try to select text to copy. Nope. Try to scroll back in terminal or tmux. Nope. Overbearing for sure.
thayne 7mo ago
That sounds a lot like my experience with claude code. IDK about OpenCode, but claude code is also largely written by LLMs, and you can tell.
fuy 7mo ago
claude code easily uses 10+GB in single session :) 1Gb sounds very efficient by comparison
BenGosub 7mo ago
I agree that Opencodr is using a lot of RAM, but regarding the features, I am ak only using the built in features and I wouldn't say they are too many, they are just enough for a complete workflow. If you need more you can install plugins, which I haven't done yet and it's my daily driver for four months.
dfhvneoieno 7mo ago
[dead]
sauercrowd 7mo ago
Highly recommend trying pi.dev It's fully open, fairly minimal, very extensible and (while getting very frequent updates) never has broken on me so far. Been using it more and more in the last two months, switching more and more from codex to it now.
1dom 7mo ago
> 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; This is my experience with most AI tools that I spend more than a few weeks with. It's happening so often it's making me question my own judgement: "if everything smells of shit, check your own shoes." I left professional software engineering a couple of years ago, and I don't know how much of this is also just me losing touch with the profession, or being an old man moaning about how we used to do it better. It reminds me of social media: there was a time where social media platforms were defined by their features, Vine was short video, snapchat was disappearing pictures, twitter was short status posts etc. but now they're all bloated messes that try do everything. The same looks to be happening with AI and agent software. They start off as defined by one features, and then become messes trying to implement the latest AI approach (skills, or tools, or functions, or RAG, or AGENTS.md, or claws etc. etc.)
- logicprog 7mo ago
  There are fairly popular exceptions to this in the AI world IMO. Pi, for instance.
  - 1dom 7mo ago
    I can fully see pi doing the same. It talks about a whole bunch of stuff it proudly doesn't do. New techniques will come around still, and if pi adopts them, it becomes bloated/unusable/unusable like opencode, and if it doesn't, then it falls behind SoTA and gets overtaken by next-big-thing. I think shitty AI software is a product of being in a bubble and the pressure to move fast and stay relevant. Just like there was a bunch of shitty blockchain software, and a bunch of shitty VR software, and a bunch of shitty mobile app software when they were booming. I don't think pi has been around long enough to prove it's immune to this yet.
port11 7mo ago
I also want to recommend it, but only to those who enjoy figuring out why their installation is broken after what was a harmless minor or even patch release. The amount of configuration updates, broken plugins… on top of what was already a difficult product to customise; it’s simply too much. Why isn’t `opencode-workspace` the default, given that the base product is barely usable? Bah. I just reinstalled AGY and Mistral’s Vibe and got on with the work. I’m old. It’s an open-source, gratis thing. I’m grateful for projects like OpenCode, but it was infuriating to configure a good set of plugins and prompts for spec-driven development, only to have it all stop working a few times because of something hard to debug.
ljm 7mo ago
I'm quite impressed by how a team managed to wangle the mental model of React and JSX into a terminal interface and in fact I can only imagine that that itself is a product of AI. That said, the runtime is so resource heavy that, even though the heavy computational workload is given to AI on a remote cluster of servers, it will bring an old-ish laptop to a stall. I do wonder though...highly interactive TUIs are not novel. I would wager that AI + the attention of frontend devs have created an environment where you can make fancy terminal UIs without concern for how terminals generally work and if Electron is sitting in the background, it proves it.

blks 7mo ago

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.

logicprog 7mo ago
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.
- jeremyjh 7mo ago
  > I think they're just somewhat irresponsible devs. Before coding agents it took quite a lot more experience before most people could develop and ship a successful product. The average years of experience of both core team and contributors was higher and this reflected in product and architecture choices that really have an impact, especially on non-functional requirements. They could have had better design and architecture in this project if they had asked the AI for more help with it, but they did not even know what to ask or how to validate the responses. Of course, lots of devs with more years of experience would do just as badly or worse. What we are seeing here though is a filter removed that means a lot of projects now are the first real product everyone the team has ever developed.

paustint 7mo ago

I recently listened to this episode from the Claude Code creator (here is the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4 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?

logicprog 7mo ago
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!
causal 7mo ago
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.
- mattmanser 7mo ago
  I feel like our industry goes through these phases where there's an obvious thought leader that everyone's copying because they are revolutionary. Like Rails/DHH was one phase, Git/GitHub another. And right now it's kinda Claude Code. But they're so obviously really bad at development that it feels like a MLM scam. I'm just describing the feeling I'm getting, perhaps badly. I use Claude, I recommended Claude for the company I worked at. But by god they're bloody awful at development. It feels like the point where someone else steps in with a rock solid, dependable, competitor and then everyone forgets Claude Code ever existed.

westoque 7mo ago

> 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.

siddboots 7mo ago
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.
- girvo 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - staticassertion 7mo ago
    > our constant claims that quality and security matter I'm 13 years into this industry, this is the first I'm hearing of this.
    - usagisushi 7mo ago
      I’ve heard the "S" in IoT stands for Security.

cpeterso 7mo ago

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 https://x.com/thdxr/status/2031377117007454421

logicprog 7mo ago
Well that's good to hear, maybe they'll improve moving forward on the release aspect at least.
rdedev 7mo ago
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
- alansaber 7mo ago
  Not terrible if they proactively depricate slop features
j45 7mo ago
What to release > What to build > Build anything faster

rbehrends 7mo ago

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 https://opencode.ai/docs/config/#precedence-order [2] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10939 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10939

TZubiri 7mo ago
I assign a specific user for it, which doesn't have much access to my files. So what I want is complete autonomy.
woctordho 7mo ago
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.
- mrln 7mo ago
  No, it is still configurable. You can specify in your opencode.json config that it should be able to run everything. I think they just argued that it shouldn't be the default. Which I agree with.
  - indigodaddy 7mo ago
    And in the webui there is a don't ask button
  - rbehrends 7mo ago
    No, the problem is that when logging in, the provider's website can provide an authentication shell command that OpenCode will send to the shell sight unseen, even if it is "rm -rf /home". This "feature" is completely unnecessary for the agent to function as an agent, or even for authentication. It's not about it being the default, it's about it being there at all and being designed that way.

bakugo 7mo ago

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.

logicprog 7mo ago
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.

foobarqux 7mo ago

What is a better option?

logicprog 7mo ago
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.
- mmcclure 7mo ago
  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/coding-agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...
andreynering 7mo ago
https://charm.land/crush https://charm.land/crush
- rao-v 7mo ago
  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?
  - andreynering 7mo ago
    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.

thatmf 7mo ago

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.

Aperocky 7mo ago
negative values even.
rounce 7mo ago
> 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.
- openclaw01 7mo ago
  [dead]

arcanemachiner 7mo ago

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/opencode_concerns_not_truely_local/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencod... [1] https://github.com/standardnguyen/rolandcode https://github.com/standardnguyen/rolandcode

nikcub 7mo ago
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)
- drdaeman 7mo ago
  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
nsonha 7mo ago
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
- ipaddr 7mo ago
  Or by testing it themselves.
  - nsonha 6mo ago
    yes testing is the alternative to observability... in an alternative universe
- 7mo ago

tshaddox 7mo ago

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.

hboon 7mo ago
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)
Darkmoon_UK 7mo ago
Currently on the hunt for OpenCode alternatives as it's become disastrously unstable in recent weeks between SSE timeout issues, broken Desktop UI and a very, very unhealthy looking GitHub PR queue, I'm out. Since I'm on a Kotlin stack, Junie CLI in ACP server mode is looking attractive.

zackify 7mo ago

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

tmatsuzaki 7mo ago
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.

grapheneposter 7mo ago

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.

scuff3d 7mo ago

Drives me nuts that we have TUIs written in friggin TS now. That being said, I do prefer OpenCode to Codex and Claude Code.

cies 7mo ago
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?)
- scuff3d 7mo ago
  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.
- esafak 7mo ago
  I find it more configurable, for defining (sub)agent abilities, plugins, and different models/providers, of course.

alienbaby 7mo ago

its hard not to wonder if they are taking their own medicine, but not quite properly

nico 7mo ago

> 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

ctxc 7mo ago
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
- lanyard-textile 7mo ago
  I've never gotten that message?
- auggierose 7mo ago
  I think it goes away if you actually use the native installer ...
  - nico 7mo ago
    The hombrew version doesn’t say anything about the native installer, but still bugs you to update after every minor version (which is every day, sometimes multiple times per day) The npm version tells you there’s a native installer and to use it instead The native installer never says anything. Not sure how it gets updated

fHr 7mo ago

Rust > TS Codex > OpenCode

namlem 7mo ago

How much of the development is being done by humans?

plastic3169 7mo ago

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.

msh 7mo ago
I don’t think good TUI’s are the same as good command line programs. Great tui apps would to me be things like Norton/midnight commander, borlands turbo pascal, vim, eMacs and things like that
- plastic3169 7mo ago
  Yes cli and tui are not the same, but I expect TUI to work decent in general terminal emulator and not acitvely block copying and pasting. Having to install supported terminal emulator goes against the vibe.
frumiousirc 7mo ago
> Copy paste is hijacked FWIW, in Kitty on Linux, SHIFT + mouse-select copies and SHIFT + middle-mouse-button pastes. This use of SHIFT and otherwise using standard Unix style copy/paste is common in a lot of TUIs (eg, weechat).

sorentwo 7mo ago

The moment that OpenCode, after helping fix a Dockerfile issue, decided it was time to deploy to prod without asking for consent, I was out.

brabel 7mo ago
You must never rely on AI itself for authorization… don’t let it run on an environment where it can do that. I can’t believe this needs to be said but everyone seems to have lost their mind and decided to give all their permissions away to a non deterministic thing that when prompted correctly will send it all out to whoever asks it nicely.

jruz 7mo ago

yeah I agree is way too buggy, nice tho and I appreciate the effort but really feels sloppy

Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago

I tried running Opencode on my 7$/yr 512mb vps but it had the OOM issue and yes it needs 1GB of ram or more. I then tried running other options like picoclaw/picocode etc but they were all really hard to manage/create The UI/UX I want is that I can just put my free openrouter api key in and then I am ready to go to get access to free models like Arcee AI right now After reading your comments/I read this thread, I tried crush by charmbracelet again and it gives the UI/UX that I want. I am definitely impressed by crush/ the charm team. They are on HN and they work great for me, highly recommended if you want something which can work on low constrained devices I do feel like Charm's TUI's are too beautiful in the sense that running a connection over SSH can delay so when I tried to copy some things, the delay made things less copy-able but overall, I think that I am using Crush and I am happy for the most part :-) Edit: That being said, just as I was typing this, Crush took all the Free requests from Openrouter that I get for free so it might be a bit of minor issue but overall its not much of an issue from Crush side, so still overall, my point is that Crush is worth checking out Kudos to the CharmBracelet team for making awesome golang applications!

jmmv 7mo ago

> and (partly as a result) it's fairly resource inefficient (often uses 1GB of RAM or more. For a TUI). That's (one of the reasons) why I'm favoring Codex over Claude Code. Claude Code is an... Electron app (for a TUI? WTH?) and Codex is Rust. The difference is tangible: the former feels sluggish and does some odd redrawing when the terminal size changes, while the latter definitely feels more snappy to me (leaving aside that GPT's responses also seem more concise). At some point, I had both chewing concurrently on the same machine and same project, and Claude Code was using multiple GBs of RAM and 100% CPU whereas Codex was happy with 80 MB and 6%. Performance _is_ a feature and I'm afraid the amounts of code AI produces without supervision lead to an amount of bloat we haven't seen before...

RagnarD 7mo ago
Totally agree. I'm baffled by those who don't clearly see that Codex works better than C.C. in many ways.
- Aeolun 7mo ago
  Codex being faster is not at all equivalent to working better. Claude Code does what I need from it most of the time.
  - RagnarD 7mo ago
    I said better, not faster. Primarily, it writes better code, works more smoothly, is better at describing what it's doing and what it's done.
    - Aeolun 7mo ago
      Well, yes, but it was in response to a post mostly waxing lyrical about using rust instead of typescript, so forgive me if I got the wrong impression. Also, that is so far outside my experience that I can’t tell if you are joking. Codex seems to always do exactly what I ask of it, nothing more, and nothing less, and with as many shortcuts as possible.
7mo ago

vrganj 7mo ago

[dead]

mihaaly 7mo ago

I tried it briefly and the practice - argued for strategy for operation actually - to override my working folder seelction and altering to the parent root git folder is a no go.

bjackman 7mo ago

That is very disappointing coz I've been wanting to try an alternative to Gemini CLI for exactly these reasons. The AI is great but the actual software is a buggy, slow, bloated blob of TypeScript (on a custom Node runtime IIUC!) that I really hate running. It takes multiple seconds to start, requires restarting to apply settings, constantly fucks up the terminal, often crashes due to JS heap overflows, doesn't respect my home dir (~/.gemini? Come on folks are we serious?), has an utterly unusable permission system, etc etc. Yet they had plenty of energy to inject silly terminal graphics and have dumb jokes and tips scroll across the screen. Is Claude Code like this too? I wonder if Pi is any better. A big downside would be paying actual cost price for tokens but on the other hand, I wouldn't be tied to Google's model backend which is also extremely flaky and unable to meet demand a lot of the time. If I could get real work done with open models (no idea if that's the case yet) and switch providers when a given provider falls over, that would be great.

knocte 7mo ago
> Is Claude Code like this too? I wonder if Pi is any better. I'm very happy with Pi myself (running it on a small VPS so that I don't need to do sandboxing shenanigans).
plagiarist 7mo ago
Claude will also happily write a huge pile of junk into your home directory, I am sad to report. The permissions are idiotic as well, but I always use it in a container anyway. But I have not had it crash and it hasn't been slow starting for me.
badlogic 7mo ago
you can use subscriptions with pi.
WhyNotHugo 7mo ago
I use Pi with Aliyun, which cost a flat ¥40 (~€5) per month for GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, Minmax and a few other models. Honestly, these models seem quite on par with Claude. Some days they seem slightly worse, some days I can't tell the difference. AFAIK, the usage quota is comparable to the Claude $200 subscription.

horsh1 7mo ago

You are describing a typical state of a wibecoded project.

darepublic 7mo ago

Why not just code your own agent harness

AppleAtCha 7mo ago

Is there a name for these types of "overbearing" and visually busy "TUIs"? It seems like all the other agents have the same aesthetic and it is unlike traditional nurses or plain text interfaces in a bad way IMO. The constant spinners, sidebars and needless margins are a nuisance to me. Especially over an ssh connection in a tmux session it feels wrong.

rco8786 7mo ago

> they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace. I wonder how much of this is because the maintainers are using OpenCode to vibe the code for OpenCode.

wvlia5 7mo ago

this is a bot comment

stego-tech 7mo ago

This is why I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to these tools on HN myself. My month with Claude Code (the TUI, not the GUI) was amazing from an IT POV, just slop-generating niche tools I could quickly implement and audit (not giant-ass projects), but I ain't outsourcing that to another company when Qwen et al are right there for running on my M1 Pro or RTX 3090. I'm looking forward to more folks building these kinds of tools with a stronger focus on portability via API or loading local models, as means of having a genuinely useful assistant or co-programmer rather than paying some big corp way too much money (and letting them use my data) for roughly the same experience.

627467 7mo ago
Curious about your setup of qwen on m1 pro. Care to share the toolkit?
plagiarist 7mo ago
Do you have a setup with a local Qwen that can write out niche tools pretty well? I have been curious about how much I could do local.
jazzypants 7mo ago
The types of models you can run locally on that hardware are toys in comparison to the foundation models

theshrike79 7mo ago

I’ve pretty much ended up with a pi.dev+gpt-5 and Claude combo. Sometimes I use GLM with Pi if I run out of quota or need some simple changes. I tried Opencode but it was just too much? Same with Crush, 10/10 pretty but lacking in features I need. LSP support was cool though.

dopidopHN2 7mo ago
Can you expands on the cool part of LSP support ? I"m curious and "on paper" it sounds desirable but I'm unclear on the pluses
- theshrike79 7mo ago
  In theory it should give the LLM better tools to explore and edit the code. So instead of working with the code as text, it's a tree of stuff it can read and edit. I don't know how much it works in practice though.

mmaunder 7mo ago

Yeah just try to select text to copy. Nope. Try to scroll back in terminal or tmux. Nope. Overbearing for sure.

thayne 7mo ago

That sounds a lot like my experience with claude code. IDK about OpenCode, but claude code is also largely written by LLMs, and you can tell.

fuy 7mo ago

claude code easily uses 10+GB in single session :) 1Gb sounds very efficient by comparison

BenGosub 7mo ago

I agree that Opencodr is using a lot of RAM, but regarding the features, I am ak only using the built in features and I wouldn't say they are too many, they are just enough for a complete workflow. If you need more you can install plugins, which I haven't done yet and it's my daily driver for four months.

dfhvneoieno 7mo ago

[dead]

sauercrowd 7mo ago

Highly recommend trying pi.dev It's fully open, fairly minimal, very extensible and (while getting very frequent updates) never has broken on me so far. Been using it more and more in the last two months, switching more and more from codex to it now.

1dom 7mo ago

> 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; This is my experience with most AI tools that I spend more than a few weeks with. It's happening so often it's making me question my own judgement: "if everything smells of shit, check your own shoes." I left professional software engineering a couple of years ago, and I don't know how much of this is also just me losing touch with the profession, or being an old man moaning about how we used to do it better. It reminds me of social media: there was a time where social media platforms were defined by their features, Vine was short video, snapchat was disappearing pictures, twitter was short status posts etc. but now they're all bloated messes that try do everything. The same looks to be happening with AI and agent software. They start off as defined by one features, and then become messes trying to implement the latest AI approach (skills, or tools, or functions, or RAG, or AGENTS.md, or claws etc. etc.)

logicprog 7mo ago
There are fairly popular exceptions to this in the AI world IMO. Pi, for instance.
- 1dom 7mo ago
  I can fully see pi doing the same. It talks about a whole bunch of stuff it proudly doesn't do. New techniques will come around still, and if pi adopts them, it becomes bloated/unusable/unusable like opencode, and if it doesn't, then it falls behind SoTA and gets overtaken by next-big-thing. I think shitty AI software is a product of being in a bubble and the pressure to move fast and stay relevant. Just like there was a bunch of shitty blockchain software, and a bunch of shitty VR software, and a bunch of shitty mobile app software when they were booming. I don't think pi has been around long enough to prove it's immune to this yet.

port11 7mo ago

I also want to recommend it, but only to those who enjoy figuring out why their installation is broken after what was a harmless minor or even patch release. The amount of configuration updates, broken plugins… on top of what was already a difficult product to customise; it’s simply too much. Why isn’t `opencode-workspace` the default, given that the base product is barely usable? Bah. I just reinstalled AGY and Mistral’s Vibe and got on with the work. I’m old. It’s an open-source, gratis thing. I’m grateful for projects like OpenCode, but it was infuriating to configure a good set of plugins and prompts for spec-driven development, only to have it all stop working a few times because of something hard to debug.

ljm 7mo ago

I'm quite impressed by how a team managed to wangle the mental model of React and JSX into a terminal interface and in fact I can only imagine that that itself is a product of AI. That said, the runtime is so resource heavy that, even though the heavy computational workload is given to AI on a remote cluster of servers, it will bring an old-ish laptop to a stall. I do wonder though...highly interactive TUIs are not novel. I would wager that AI + the attention of frontend devs have created an environment where you can make fancy terminal UIs without concern for how terminals generally work and if Electron is sitting in the background, it proves it.