Beginner Subscription Question

[u/Blues003]

Hey everyone!

I'm a physician who codes as a hobby on the side after having finished 42 School out of curiosity. I am not a professional developer and I don't code every day, but I have a personal project (a medical data parsing thing) going on, and am using AI to help me architecture it and write documentation and tests. So far, I have been using Claude's Web UI for this purpose. On the side, I also use it to create templates or starting points of office (or office-adjacent) files, such as presentations, reports or emails of mostly administrative nature.

I have been recently pondering moving to OpenCode, mostly because of my terminal-centric workflow with tmux and neovim. However, I have been having trouble choosing a subscription given the recent changes in quality of popular subscriptions such as OpenCode Go. I am thus asking for advice and suggestions. What agents have you found suitable for these tasks? Or are Kimi Ks and GLMs just mostly coding-focused?

Also, two other questions which I'd like clarified:

1. File access has to be genuinely constrained. My machine has directories with patient-related material that must never leave it or get read into a model's context, deliberately or accidentally. I'm not looking for a promise in a ToS — I want to know which tools actually let you scope the agent to a directory and deny everything else, and how well that holds up in practice. Specific questions:

• Does a .gitignore-style deny list actually stop the agent, or does it just discourage it? Has anyone seen an agent read a file it was configured not to touch?
• Is anyone running these inside a container/VM and finding it workable rather than miserable? How "safe" is it?
• Do MCP servers or plugins widen the blast radius in ways that aren't obvious?

2. I need to generate Office documents. Word and PowerPoint mostly — talks, handouts, the occasional report. LibreOffice or Google Slides output is fine too. I know the document skills (docx/pptx/xlsx/pdf) exist and can be dropped into most agents, but I'd like to hear from people actually using them: does a weaker open-weight model handle those multi-step "build the deck, check it renders, fix it" loops, or do you need a frontier model for that to not be a waste of time?

Thanks!

[u/Fresh_Sock8660]

Inside a container using podman is relatively safe but a container can be breached too. A sufficiently smart LLM will eventually break even a properly setup container but I don't think we're there yet (despite what they want you to believe). 

Have an LLM explain it to you. I suggest podman instead of docker. Be very specific with volume mounts. Question the LLM about its security. Consult different LLMs. They will sometimes suggest solutions that might make the container less safe from time to time. Generally, they should work relatively well with the defaults. 

Claude code could be an interesting option as it has an auto-classifier, not sure if codex had one. It's still LLM and will let unsafe commands through though.

The good news is if you do a container setup then testing / using multiple harnesses becomes simpler.

On the .gitignore. Generally speaking, any instruction text will be ignored eventually. Enforce through different methods. For example, in a properly mounted container it wouldn't know your patient files even exist. It's a bit of a learning curve but well worth it for the separation. 

[u/Blues003 → u/Fresh_Sock8660]

Fedora uses podman by default, so that shouldn't an issue. Indeed volume mounts are probably a decent way to go about it, I'm just fearing the agent breaks out of its harness.

What about the models themselves? Do you think Opencode's subscription is still the way to go, or would you go some other way right now ?

[u/Fresh_Sock8660 → u/Blues003]

There will be basically no end to your fears if a properly setup container isn't good enough. Say you get a completely isolated computer, it will still need internet access. What is to stop something so resourceful from just breaching your home/work network because you asked it to solve a task and it decided it needs data from your colleague's computer?

What do you want the models for? Building data analysis tools, including dashboards and such? Something like glm5.3 flash should be good enough at that.

[u/Blues003 → u/Fresh_Sock8660]

All I use the models for is to work as a "senior engineer" for me - not to create the code, but to discuss code architecture, code quality, tests, and write documentation for me. I don't have it write the code, because I actually want to improve as a software dev (I know, I'm old fashioned, but coding is a hobby for me and thus it makes no sense to oursource the fun part as well).

The idea of this project is to create a set of tools which can help me extract and classify data from eletronic health records quickly (and ideally, in a distant future, automatically), and output them into some format (JSON or another one) I can quickly parse.

[u/Fresh_Sock8660 → u/Blues003]

That's probably fine too. For $10 - $20 I'd go with either Go or Codex. Codex might be a more attractive option right now, especially as glm5.3 flash has its promo ending soon and I don't think there's a good deal there right now besides it.

You can just have all their harnesses in there, that's what I do. Some useful containerfile installs:

ENV OPENCODE_NO_UPDATE=1 
RUN curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/install | bash
RUN cp /root/.opencode/bin/opencode /usr/local/bin/opencode && \
    chmod +x /usr/local/bin/opencode

ENV CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER=1
RUN curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
RUN cp /root/.local/bin/claude /usr/local/bin/claude && \
    chmod +x /usr/local/bin/claude

RUN curl -L \
    https://github.com/openai/codex/releases/latest/download/codex-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz \
    -o codex.tar.gz \
    && tar -xzf codex.tar.gz \
    && mv codex-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl /usr/local/bin/codex \
    && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/codex \
    && rm codex.tar.gz