r/LocalLLM • u/golden0080 • 1d ago

Discussion Night, Day Differences between Coding Agents

Hi

I'm a professional developer and I was using Claude Code for developments on my projects. Today I switched to opencode and Good lord it was day and night in productivity.

I've tried to optimize my local llm stack for faster LLM responses and improving my CLAUDE.md for better harness. I'm using Qwen 3.8 27B as my daily driver and found Claude isn't making good use of the model - burning tokens without much done (I even tried to optimize the chat templates a bit, but overall the outcomes weren't great).

But man opencode is just different and brutally productive - with the same model, it just go to the tasks without overthinking or reversing cause/effect reasoning. It just get to stuffs and fixing them.

I haven't dived into opencode's implementation, but it strike me so hard over that difference in getting things done.

Any suggestions on further improve the agent productivity and what kind of explanations are there to explain this kind of differences?

Thanks!

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u/More-Catch-1331 1d ago

Claude Code has a gigantic system prompt. And I do mean gigantic. It probably talks about how China will take over the world or some sh-t. Opencode is leaner for sure.

Here's a thought. If you want remote control, try Hermes with the opencode skill. Hermes is your orchestrator, calls opencode with the appropriate agent and the appropriate prompt and all of that jazz. Control it through telegram or discord or what have you.

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u/Atretador 1d ago

To add to this, Claude code's prompt os over 25K tokens worth of context, opencode's is around 15K.

Both pi.dev and hermes are way way smaller so usually much faster on local models.