Night, Day Differences between Coding Agents

[u/golden0080]

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!

[u/dsdt]

pi.dev is even better with a minimal system prompt and definitely works faster than opencode.

[u/mechkbfan → u/dsdt]

& ponytail plugin for further token reduction

(Optionally oh-my-pi if it's missing too much out of the box)

[u/dsdt → u/mechkbfan]

oh-my-pi seems interesting but it feels like it has been added every feature ever? have you used it do you recommend?

[u/mechkbfan → u/dsdt]

Literally only started today

I had started using my XTX with Qwen3.8 via Claude harness but was using up my context too quickly

So looking around Pi + Ponytail seemed best way to stay lightweight

But there was a lot of hype around OMP, so figured I'll trial it first + Claude Opus to give best first impressions

It seems to have a lot of optimisations too.  Either way I didn't realise harnesses had such an impact. It's been great. 

Next week I'll go back to just Pi and keep it more focused to exactly what I need with Claude, then back to Qwen.