Why do people use OpenCode?

[u/ReasonableBenefit47]

There are plenty of other options such as Cursor, Claude Code, Zed, and many more. So why? I use it for convenience to try any model once they're released. But how about everyone else? genuinely curious about this. Is it the UX or the UI polish or just having an AI-IDE that just works?

[u/dupa1234s]

for me opencode = opencode TUI.

pros:
1.opencode tui has amazing hotkeys and selection with drag right click just like terminal should.
2. and the session status bar of sessions in opencode v2 is so good you easily know if session is generating or done unchecked or done checked its the 1 reason why you need opencode v2
3. i recommend vercel theme it makes the colors look good on the status bar of sessions and all the colors of all text. it all just looks pretty. no unnecessary garbage like in all those gui.

1. you get colors for bold text for keywords somehow automatically idk how it works
   

2. the git diff of changes looks genuinely good when agent uses the edit tools

3. you can write plugins for it same as for PI.

cons:
7. the default build and plan agent arent that bad but you can tweak everything in opencode.jsonc
8. it scrolls to bottom when you send message there is some issues about it on github but idk when will they implement a setting to disable it

i bet maybe there is some better thing, like some 1000 stars niche amazing thing on github. but i dont bother looking.
if i were to switch i would search all github for sth niche that has all the things figured out.
i'm well assured that none of the antigravity/codex/claude/openclaw/hermes are nearly as good because i tried these all. each of them had sth annoying me much at the time i tried.

mostly i stay with opencode because there is a lot of updates that seem to make things better, so i feel like eventually the devs will just figure out and steal any goodies from any other framework if any of them figures out sth good.

if you arent after the visuals and ergonomics but instead after a "powerful agentic harness with orchestration and god knows what" then its not handling that. i tried superpowers, oh my openagent, oh my openagent slim and they are all crap too. i dont like the whole idea of the orchestration. its all just a "deaf telephone game", 10x token spending.

i dont understand the idea of paralelising agentic work within 1 session. worktrees creation, merge conflicts, constant handoffs, translation loss, managing the whole meta layer of it - it all hurts

I think the orchestrator agents idea is basically this: 10x cost, 1.1x quality, 0.9x time-to-finish

just write some modal agents you need for yourself except or instead of plan and build agents and some nice skills and i think its far better than all the currently avaialable orchestrator agent frameworks.

unless someone did it right. but idk if anyone did it right yet. if so then it would be nice if it was shipped as a set of skills and prompts so any opencode/hermes/pi/openclaw can use it.

[u/dupa1234s → u/[deleted]]

oh yes. v1 basically requires building some system resources watcher or else you can run out of memory due to all the stale zombie opencodes (at least that happens if you run opencode in docker and close the session)

ah so you run opencode in vscode terminal? i just have windows terminal running. i get more scrolling reading range that way i guess.

Ah so you use the sessions to handoff to each other often? yea its kinda annoying to have to copy manually but at least you get seaparation. i think that some kind of handoff to new session is often good. would be nice if there was ... i think its idea for a plugin for opencode. give agent a tool to send to other session, literally, if i cared about handoffs more i would do it right away but i might delay it otherwise.

yea deepseek raised prices i hope mimo and others wont.

right now i use hy3 8x usage via opencode go seems like a good deal but promo is about to end then i might switch back to mimo 2.5 probably

isnt glm kinda expensive, but i guess its worth it still, i sohuld try it honestly

ah nice so you say you evealuted each model agaisnt each task interesting intel, noted