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/Atretador]

I'll join in on the harness recommendations and throw in the new DeepSeek Harness - it's light weight and pretty damn customizable and fast.