I think it's due to they are doing a funny business to parse the progress, that's pretty much vibed and no one care. Like instead of using curl's progress, they re-invented a progress tracking with the tracing interface (--trace-ascii), byte by byte :(
Okay nevermind this is pretty bad. Although humans do this too and I've also done this without realizing it, only noticed when I was trying to move a file bigger than few kilobytes.
I’m kind of surprised at the overlap in “has progress bar” and “is expected to take a few seconds max”.
I’ve never even debated it for files under hundreds of megs. It’ll show up soon, if I care I’ll do an ls in a loop to look at file sizes. Just log where the file is.
I don't think fast gpu rendering terminals should be mandatory for this kind of thing, and if you should have an option that facilitates the need for one then might I suggest falling back to something sensible rather than stalling out for forever when the user doesn't render glyphs as fast as you want them to?
My terminal has gpu acceleration disabled due to being wasteful with vram and while I don't use opencode I've ran the script and it was completely fine using minimal cpu.
If it doesn't work at least ok with something like xterm, someone really needs to reconsider some life decisions. Htop makes it work, why should a terminal emulator need to crack the engima just to render silly stuff?
I suspect heavy eyes free coding. I spent the last week helping them understand a major security regression in config loading, took two issues/pull requests. Our hunch is the Ai told them what they had was good, not enough human critical thinking.
I've switched to Pi because I do not like the direction v2 has taken UX. Nor do I trust the security posturing going forward. There is also the social media stunts of the CEO that push me away.
I'm now trying to advocate Pi adopt system level configuration for similar security reasons. If any HNers would like to add their thoughts, please do so here
Ive anecdotally never found OpenCode to have a real axis where I find it "best". But I havent tried it in a bit, mostly because I don't have a real gap in use case coverage between Codex/CC/Pi. Anything more specific in need probably gets a custom harness.
The Go plan is quite good, possibly the best deal out there. I recommend it for anyone interested in trying open weights ($10/month, very generous quota), and you can use it with any harness or direct curl. I have my Go sub configured through GoModel (no relation, my gateway of choice, also very good).
Is there a way to buy tokens with a good model that makes OpenCode near as cheap as Claude Code with a Claude Pro subscription?
For personal projects, Claude Pro seems to give me a lot of tokens to use with Claude Code, and from experiments using other models with Claude Code (e.g. via Vercel) always seems way more expensive.
Many of the annoyances from V1 are gone. Skills and plugins reload automatically (finally). Tasks can be backgrounded (though I think this doesn't happen automatically yet). There's a built-in skill for editing the configuration (finally I can retire mine). The front-end got some love. Apparently they re-architected the loop around Effect. Sub-sessions can be communicated with better. Configuration is loaded from the folder the session is created in rather than where the server was started.
In general, this update largely takes OpenCode into the current age features-wise and is a good overhaul quality-wise. Just in time to stop my early switching away efforts, which would've been a pain because I know few other harnesses with such a strong server/client model.
Yeah, but only I can click to move a task to the background when it takes longer, which could and IMO should happen automatically. The model can’t always judge that. (I see how my comment wasn’t clear enough that I mean this)
In general, the preventable “model gets stuck” class of annoyances has not been fixed quite yet - there are also stil no timeouts for permission requests, at least by default.
To me, there are more annoyances in V2, so many that I've switched harnesses to Pi (for now?). I think the hot-reload is another security misalignment. An agent should not be able to modify plugins and have that immediately reloaded for availability.
DeepSeek Harness allows the user/agent to build its own plug-ins and run them without restart, mostly. Pi and OpenCode were then influenced to do the same in their respective new versions. I don't know which has the better implementation.
Took me a little while to figure out this was a llm harness for coding (also called an agent, I suppose, but that term seems overloaded and ambiguous to me)
There are many of these available, alongside the provider ones.
Are there any benchmarks which help me decide which ones I should try over the standard codex/claude?
For example, consider something like SWEBench, where a test should pass. Harness or a skill can just tell the agent keep trying until the test pass. So same model can have a lot of behavior changes between the harnesses.
In my experience (i own a multi-agent IDE with 50+ supported harness) folks stick to first party, usually either openai or anthropic, grok, agy; if they are willing to pay for the subscription the value is unbeatable. And they don't risk trying different harnesses.
I made a harness too, and recently added eval with opencode and pi and I sat between them. No gaming other than trying to figure out why I was really bad on some evals (I was not returning thinking tokens which broke cache, for example, and different model families do things way different here). I have yet to try my harness for coding but I do have a few terabytes for it to read. And I’d rather use a local model that’s fast and good at retention, but that run could take a year, lol.
Native apps connecting to the OpenCode server is a great way to run sessions on remote hosts!
I wish Claude Code would adopt the same model. The desktop app deploys a separate engine that restarts and clobbers long-running sessions upon reconnect (Remote Control is their recommended solution but requires a Claude.ai account).
I’ve been vibe coding a native macOS Claude Code app that spawns a server that wraps Claude Code on remote hosts, but the UX and features are always lagging behind.
Claude code agents have a protocol that's usable for the same purpose it just listen locally but it's usable i have my own claw-like that has options for claude, codex, and pi (my subscription, wife subscription, and i got a yearly sub on glm when it was cheap)
A well written TUI, esp with keyboard shortcuts is a power multiplier. One of the biggest bus companies in my country used real terminals well into 2000s, and continued to use the same TUI inside a terminal emulator then.
It was efficient, bug free and fast after that many years of polish and refinement, it became one of the defining pillars of the experience. Imagine doing something and that thing can be reproduced reliably by muscle memory. You can trust that system.
Trading consoles are basically TUIs which can be driven with their specialized keyboards at great speeds and reproducibility, as well.
Wat? I would have thought a TUI is the least ADA compliant. Sure it has hotkeys (as does any decent GUI app) but does it have TalkBack and all the other accessibility features? I don't think ASCII-art is very accessibility friendly.
I don't think that's the case. This is from anomalyco, the company who made sst.dev. Crush is from Charm. I think OpenCode may have originally been written in Go but nowadays their codebase is TypeScript.
Edit: I'm missing some context others have pointed out.
I'm really tired of this being retread time and time and time again.
It's just not interesting, it doesn't seem to matter, they are are separate projects and both doing great. The inside baseball about old history doesn't feel like it goes anywhere, adds anything. It didn't the last 5 times opencode got submitted!
Is there azure login capability, for az login?
We are 100+ devs and claude code has this built in by default where we can host our own models in Azure Foundry. Devs don't need any keys since they can just use az login and it just works.
Interesting and I'll definitely give this a try, the client/server and plugin system do look very powerful.
However, I've been using OMP in combination with Tern (the terminal) lately and it's an incredibly smooth operation. It's hard to find a decent terminal on Windows (corporate device) but this is the best I've found so far.
Based on this post, it sounds like a ton of great improvements.
I've only used OpenCode a bit, but I found it was sufficient for the workloads I was throwing at it. It wasn't quite enough to beat out Codex or Claude Code as my go-to choice, though. Perhaps I'll give this version a shot and see if they've gotten it over the hump.
It's a big improvement over the previous version. Currently, the Codex TUI has constant display issues for me, the most prevalent being random deviations of light/dark characters. So far no such issue in OpenCode. Since it's model agnostic, this might become my daily driver.
OpenChamber ftw! I'm surprised it's not more popular - so much nicer to use than the TUI.
I'm always confused when people at work show me their opencode or Claude code setup of 6 terminal windows open simultaneously with the same illegible walls of text. No idea how people still prefer that over a nice GUI.
There's this amazing three letter harness that had all those features and more for many, many months already, but many aren't ready for that conversation
tried opencode for the first time to use the $200 in api credits that come with claude max but can't be used in claude code. it's great. the free nemotron 3 model is even decent, i love seeing agentic coding accessible to students and hobbiests and folks that can't drop $200/mo.
i used the bonus anthropic credits to get ornith 1.5 35b q8 running on a jetson. it's no opus 5, but it's usable for real coding and sys admin work, and works great in opencode. at least as good as sonnet 4. 5 token/sec is a little painful though.
Found out on 1.x it goes crazy with file watches. If you launch in a top level directory with lots of sub directories, iirc it can create millions of watches X2
Not sure if it's fixed in 2.x. There's some way to get it to not do that with ignore files or rules but not sure exactly how--I had Claude fix it...
it feels like a clear improvement across the board but a heads up: i got bitten by upgrading - since all tool calls now go through the background process, the sandbox that i use to wrap the TUI process quietly became useless. took me a day or two to realize that web fetches, etc. which should have been blocked were succeeding.
There are at least 3 security regressions (imo) in the initial v2 release
1. configuration loading (now fixed) dropped support for system level, then restored it incorrectly, now it is better, but still some issues in user space
2. hot-reloading of plugins, agents can now change them with immediate effect
3. this, which I was unaware of
I wonder how many more there are given this much has been found already
Are there any recommended sandbox patterns to use? Custom linux users or bubblewrap and managing openbao is getting to be a lot to manage each harness by themselves!
I've been using https://nono.sh which uses landlock instead of bubblewrap. I had a look at all the similar alternatives when I started using it and everything else I could find was far too vibe coded for me to trust, especially for this.
they deprecated the old layout which I very much preferred in open code desktop. I'm never in a rush so I'll wait for the early adopters to vouch for this release.
The background task / subagent feature and the ability to specify a model when starting a subagent are so far my favorite improvements. Small things but make huge QoL difference in everyday development.
You may like pi-web-ui, it has a ton of useful functionality. Was a bit rough around the edges before but it's improved quickly. (https://pi.dev/packages/pi-web-ui)
I was a Vim user that switched to VS Code (for reasons) and now the TUIs are where my Vim personalization efforts have been redirected. Pi is a good harness for vim users to consider if they want to try a TUI experience. The Pi plugin ecosystem is a slopfest though. There are vim bindings for Pi and OC (and VS Code) because I'm never going to give those up.
The site took a minute to load in completely and when I scrolled to the bottom I couldn't read the SDK text, it was literally cut off, kinda resembling the current state of coding very accurately lmao
I've been getting good results from OpenCode. Has anyone been able to get it to work with local models though? It doesn't seem to want to play nice with Ollama.
I have an open code server running as a service on a linux desktop with the port opened up so I can use the web UI from my windows laptop. The same linux desktop is running Ollama and I'm currently using qwen3.6:35b with it.
The setup was mostly for the learning experience and I haven't done any serious work with it, but it's been great for writing bash scripts.
OpenCode is a beast. Does it still try to take a disk snapshot of my working directory, even when it contains hundreds of millions of files? Does it still eat all of my memory? Does it still have a super-gigantic system prompt that wastes a solid percentage of my context window before I've even begun?
I switched to pi some months ago, and I have no complaints. It just does what it says, with no shenanigans. They updated the rendering approach recently so scrollback is nice and smooth now.
I switched to Pi after experiencing OpenCode V2 about a week ago. Dislike the UX direction a lot. I took some effort to sift through the Pi plugin ecosystem to get my setup in a good place.
I will say OpenCode has likely improved significantly from your experience. I never experienced any of that since ~May of this year when I picked up OpenCode the first time.
For me the distinguishing feature of OpenCode is the web ui/desktop app. I’m using OpenCode because it’s the only open-source agent-harness I’ve tried that runs outside of a TUI. I like terminals but not TUIs and especially not for prose-based interactions like prompting.
But that’s a shallow moat, and the rest of the features here are not particularly interesting to me. I don’t have a use for plugins or a model-server proxy (I can connect other tools directly to the model provider).
Unfortunately many subscriptions require you use their harness. In that case, I highly recommend using Termic (https://github.com/simion/termic/).
It's an incredibly useful GUI that lets you use the provider's harness, but adds extra productivity features. You can use OpenCode, Pi, Claude, Codex, whatever you want. The TUI runs in a window, but you can also pull up terminals, open tabs, keep projects, workspaces, show file diffs, give feedback on lines of code, review PRs, and way, way more. The number of features is impressive.
The devs are very quickly adding features, yet the app remains stable. And they fix bugs super fast! They fixed like three bugs and implemented two feature requests of mine within a week of asking. Best of all the whole thing is FOSS and they're not trying to make money off you. Absolutely awesome maintainers.
Same OpenCode team who ignore bug reports, don't respond on their discord, don't have modern CI/CD test suites (often shipping regressions), don't have bots to triage bug reports or PRs, and have what might be the worst open model subscription service available today.
OpenCode users: switching to Pi takes about 5 minutes, and customizing it to work just like OpenCode takes another 30 minutes. Better design, better devs, better community.
OpenCode Go is the best deal in the market right now imo. Their quotas are so generous I often assume they are burning money, but I think they are largely thriving off of the subscription revenues and making it work, or their vendors are subsidizing things.
While I just switched from OpenCode to Pi, I'm still unclear on which is better in terms of handling github issues/pull-requests. I do give OC credit here, especially after the last week.
Here's the Pi issue for a security feature request, derived from an opencode v2 security regression I was able to work through with the OC team. This issue links to the OpenCode ones too.
OC is all right -- it's my daily driver -- but it could be better. I'd like a harness to let me customize the GUI, not just add MCPs and plugins. For example, I'd like add buttons to merge a PR, and show indicators for CI. Claude Code does a lot of this out of the box. Give me UI building blocks (buttons, labels, etc.) and wire them with my own functions. Could Code Mode enable this?
The built-in browser is a most welcome feature.
PS(A): Opencode Go is a great deal and now has a $40 plan.
If you hang out on HN, you see this kind of statement a lot, it's happens so often (more than any other language right now, used to be TypeScript), it's the outside perception of the ecosystem. If they chill out on the superiority claims, that perception can change like it did for TypeScript.
Somehow I manage to get issues noticed and PRs merged. They aggressively cull old issues but if they take notice things get done. I contributed just this week.
These guys stole money from me. It amounts to like 10 US or something, so not significant, but still...
Their models have pricing published in their docs, like any other LLM provider. I measured the tokens I consumed, did the math, and it was always off, in their favor. One model (GPT Luna) was about 2x as expensive as advertised.
I joined their Discord, which is apparently how you get support from them. I filed a bug and someone from their team replied, we verified the data, and he said that something was indeed off and that he'd escalate it. Then silence. After 2–3 weeks, I followed up and was now ignored.
As I said, the amount isn't material to me, but if they do this a million times, they could make some decent money out of it. No idea if it's on purpose, I'll leave that to the reader to speculate.
Overall, their complete lack of interest after acknowledging the "bug" left a really bad taste in my mouth, so I decided to leave.
Ahh. I recall their opencode go plan offered $60-$80 worth of Deepseek for $5-10 or something? I was debating if I should try it out but I think this is convincing me not to...Thanks for the heads up
Bros - that opening disk transfer interaction is peak awesomeness. I copied about 4 files and did not want to stop...Id sit there all day and do all of them just to see what happens in the end...perhaps later this weekend.
It turns out it's incredibly slow... because of the progress bar rendering. This is insane. The installer took 6 minutes to reach 10%:
curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/v2/install | bash
Managed to fix it by running this instead:
curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/v2/install | bash 2>&1 | cat
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/22998 https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/53702
I’ve never even debated it for files under hundreds of megs. It’ll show up soon, if I care I’ll do an ls in a loop to look at file sizes. Just log where the file is.
either that or fail outright; dont waste my time.
...
claude code?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50075319
I've switched to Pi because I do not like the direction v2 has taken UX. Nor do I trust the security posturing going forward. There is also the social media stunts of the CEO that push me away.
I'm now trying to advocate Pi adopt system level configuration for similar security reasons. If any HNers would like to add their thoughts, please do so here
https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/10895
Maybe the Go plan is changing that for others?
time curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/v2/install | bash
real 0m24.975s user 0m9.537s sys 0m14.904s
For personal projects, Claude Pro seems to give me a lot of tokens to use with Claude Code, and from experiments using other models with Claude Code (e.g. via Vercel) always seems way more expensive.
Many of the annoyances from V1 are gone. Skills and plugins reload automatically (finally). Tasks can be backgrounded (though I think this doesn't happen automatically yet). There's a built-in skill for editing the configuration (finally I can retire mine). The front-end got some love. Apparently they re-architected the loop around Effect. Sub-sessions can be communicated with better. Configuration is loaded from the folder the session is created in rather than where the server was started.
In general, this update largely takes OpenCode into the current age features-wise and is a good overhaul quality-wise. Just in time to stop my early switching away efforts, which would've been a pain because I know few other harnesses with such a strong server/client model.
In general, the preventable “model gets stuck” class of annoyances has not been fixed quite yet - there are also stil no timeouts for permission requests, at least by default.
I thought it was just me. The damn thing get sucked when standing up my applications like half the time
There are many of these available, alongside the provider ones.
Are there any benchmarks which help me decide which ones I should try over the standard codex/claude?
For example, consider something like SWEBench, where a test should pass. Harness or a skill can just tell the agent keep trying until the test pass. So same model can have a lot of behavior changes between the harnesses.
In my experience (i own a multi-agent IDE with 50+ supported harness) folks stick to first party, usually either openai or anthropic, grok, agy; if they are willing to pay for the subscription the value is unbeatable. And they don't risk trying different harnesses.
They are vendor offerings but you don’t have to take them.
I wish Claude Code would adopt the same model. The desktop app deploys a separate engine that restarts and clobbers long-running sessions upon reconnect (Remote Control is their recommended solution but requires a Claude.ai account).
I’ve been vibe coding a native macOS Claude Code app that spawns a server that wraps Claude Code on remote hosts, but the UX and features are always lagging behind.
The Opencode desktop app could already connect to a remote web session; does it now talk to the server directly?
EDIT: as a rewrite, owning the name. but not code.
https://x.com/thdxr/status/1933561254481666466
It was efficient, bug free and fast after that many years of polish and refinement, it became one of the defining pillars of the experience. Imagine doing something and that thing can be reproduced reliably by muscle memory. You can trust that system.
Trading consoles are basically TUIs which can be driven with their specialized keyboards at great speeds and reproducibility, as well.
Edit: I'm missing some context others have pointed out.
It's just not interesting, it doesn't seem to matter, they are are separate projects and both doing great. The inside baseball about old history doesn't feel like it goes anywhere, adds anything. It didn't the last 5 times opencode got submitted!
Interactive element are distinct from text.
If webpage page is an interactive canvas , make the canvas the main thing ad text as support.
If you start mixing the two idk..
However, I've been using OMP in combination with Tern (the terminal) lately and it's an incredibly smooth operation. It's hard to find a decent terminal on Windows (corporate device) but this is the best I've found so far.
I've only used OpenCode a bit, but I found it was sufficient for the workloads I was throwing at it. It wasn't quite enough to beat out Codex or Claude Code as my go-to choice, though. Perhaps I'll give this version a shot and see if they've gotten it over the hump.
Once I got past the initial hurdle of having to upgrade my server and clients all at once, everything has been smooth sailing.
I'm always confused when people at work show me their opencode or Claude code setup of 6 terminal windows open simultaneously with the same illegible walls of text. No idea how people still prefer that over a nice GUI.
i used the bonus anthropic credits to get ornith 1.5 35b q8 running on a jetson. it's no opus 5, but it's usable for real coding and sys admin work, and works great in opencode. at least as good as sonnet 4. 5 token/sec is a little painful though.
Not sure if it's fixed in 2.x. There's some way to get it to not do that with ignore files or rules but not sure exactly how--I had Claude fix it...
You need to run it with —standalone to properly sandbox it.
Those tools should be designed to be sandboxed.
1. configuration loading (now fixed) dropped support for system level, then restored it incorrectly, now it is better, but still some issues in user space
2. hot-reloading of plugins, agents can now change them with immediate effect
3. this, which I was unaware of
I wonder how many more there are given this much has been found already
Are there any recommended sandbox patterns to use? Custom linux users or bubblewrap and managing openbao is getting to be a lot to manage each harness by themselves!
https://github.com/microsoft/mxc
The setup was mostly for the learning experience and I haven't done any serious work with it, but it's been great for writing bash scripts.
I switched to pi some months ago, and I have no complaints. It just does what it says, with no shenanigans. They updated the rendering approach recently so scrollback is nice and smooth now.
I will say OpenCode has likely improved significantly from your experience. I never experienced any of that since ~May of this year when I picked up OpenCode the first time.
But that’s a shallow moat, and the rest of the features here are not particularly interesting to me. I don’t have a use for plugins or a model-server proxy (I can connect other tools directly to the model provider).
It's long been surpassed by better UIs like OpenChamber. Looks like I'll be trying Paseo out next.
TLDR of the benefits over OpenChamber?
It's an incredibly useful GUI that lets you use the provider's harness, but adds extra productivity features. You can use OpenCode, Pi, Claude, Codex, whatever you want. The TUI runs in a window, but you can also pull up terminals, open tabs, keep projects, workspaces, show file diffs, give feedback on lines of code, review PRs, and way, way more. The number of features is impressive.
The devs are very quickly adding features, yet the app remains stable. And they fix bugs super fast! They fixed like three bugs and implemented two feature requests of mine within a week of asking. Best of all the whole thing is FOSS and they're not trying to make money off you. Absolutely awesome maintainers.
OpenCode users: switching to Pi takes about 5 minutes, and customizing it to work just like OpenCode takes another 30 minutes. Better design, better devs, better community.
I thought $80 of deepseek usage for $10 was a pretty good deal, but I’d be delighted to hear of better ones.
Here's the Pi issue for a security feature request, derived from an opencode v2 security regression I was able to work through with the OC team. This issue links to the OpenCode ones too.
https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/10895
The Pi dev does not seem to grasp the issue after several back and forths.
I do really like their CONTRIBUTING.md
https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING....
The built-in browser is a most welcome feature.
PS(A): Opencode Go is a great deal and now has a $40 plan.
Scion was the tool I'd been using for this, but haven't been doing that kind of stuff for some time.
https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/scion/overview/
> TypeScript
Considering the whole thing is LLM produced I would like an explicit answer as to why C++ or Rust weren't used to write the project in.
Also, the Rust ecosystem is annoying with demands for explicit answers to why their preferred language was not used.
One person != "the ecosystem"
Several basic things don't work, like hiding the sidebar.
With 3.2k open GitHub issues there's no point reporting anything.
I had one this week that, while took some effort to explain the why, was handled better than I expected. (https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/54921)
Being the most popular open harness, they get inundated with slop and are doing their best (imo).
Their models have pricing published in their docs, like any other LLM provider. I measured the tokens I consumed, did the math, and it was always off, in their favor. One model (GPT Luna) was about 2x as expensive as advertised.
I joined their Discord, which is apparently how you get support from them. I filed a bug and someone from their team replied, we verified the data, and he said that something was indeed off and that he'd escalate it. Then silence. After 2–3 weeks, I followed up and was now ignored.
As I said, the amount isn't material to me, but if they do this a million times, they could make some decent money out of it. No idea if it's on purpose, I'll leave that to the reader to speculate.
Overall, their complete lack of interest after acknowledging the "bug" left a really bad taste in my mouth, so I decided to leave.
I'd prefer not to share my Discord username here.
Huh?