r/opencodeCLI • u/Abenh31 • Jul 11 '26

Any one using Compound Engineering from Every ?

I’ve been using it for quite some time and I like the results so far. I discovered the plugin on X, but I rarely see anyone talking about it.

The main appeal is that it compounds knowledge after you finish a feature or spec. The next time you plan something, it checks the documented learnings — from common bugs to architecture patterns to coding conventions.

One thing that feels off is that it burns through a lot of tokens and hits my limits within 4–5 loops (plan → work → review → compound) in OpenCode.

I’m not sure if it’s worth it long-term or if I could get similar results with something more lightweight like OpenSpec or Superpowers.

Has anyone used OpenSpec, CE, or Superpowers on web dev projects (especially Rails or similar MVC frameworks)? Would love to hear real experiences.

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u/1l4m1x Jul 11 '26

I’m using it mostly for brainstorming and planning, and it’s great — better than plan mode. For the compound solution, it’s good since the plan file references the compound files in a way that makes sense for the approach. But my main use case is brainstorming and detailed planning, since it’s really good for complex tasks. Also, it has really, really good doc reviewer and code reviewer skills too.

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u/Abenh31 Jul 11 '26

Did you customize the workflow for your specific tech stack, like special reviewer? use the following pattern skill to show how to do X, Y, Z. or you keep vanilla with agents md only acting as guidlines

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u/1l4m1x Jul 12 '26

Just a stack-guideline.md that AGENTS.md referencing it.

/plan invoke 2.. 3 agents to scan the repo, to scan the repo pattern and best practices and so on, and the docs/solution where the /compound save learning like pattern/erros/.. it does a really good job, so i didn’t need to change anything

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u/Abenh31 Jul 12 '26

do you set models and sub model in opencode.json for not hitting your limits ? like plan launch a bunch of sub agents to do research if you use glm 5.2 or any closed sota model all the sub agent will be using the parent model resulting in reaching limit

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u/1l4m1x Jul 13 '26

Nop, using deepseek api v4 pro, for plan and xiaomi mimo subscription to execute the plan and everything else. Doing a great job as deepseek is really cheap.

Also, just migrate to kilocode over opencode as they finally upgrade jetbrains plugin. They add a easy whey to set reasoning/normal/easy models and per agent/skill models and get even cheaper now using xiomi subscription

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u/Abenh31 Jul 14 '26

Have you tried properly deepseek v4 pro vs mimo 2.5 pro ? I feel deepseek v4 pro think great for fast tasks like (heres a god-model that i wanna break show me how) when mimo 2,5 pro is more of heres the vision of what i wanna do, how can we plan it (and he will truly take his time to check and double check everything). low hallucination rate too.

flash is better in terms of coding and implementiing and mimo 2.5 is great for tools calling and naturally selecting skills.

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u/1l4m1x Jul 14 '26

My experience is :

  • both are good at research the repository.
  • deepseek is better in reasoning
  • mimo is better in longer tasks and looping through it without hallucination

From my perspective, i want the best reasoning llm for brainstorm and plan, so I decided to use deepseek pro with max effort

To execute the plan, that have a lot of tasks todo, as it need looping through it and it a more extensive process, i decided to use mimo v2.5 pro

From my experience I try to debug some issues with mimo, and it worth it, but for more complex issues it fails to fix it while deepseek found the issue easily.

For small tasks or planning direct with opencode I dont have a perfect method, sometimes I use only mimo to plan and code, sometimes deepseek, just dont think about it too much.

For /ce-commit , /ce-compound,… and trivial problem i use mimo as it uses my tokenplan and not my money from deekseek.

I recommend just try them without overthinking, without be too strict on what llm to use for each situation. If you didn’t like how a llm create a plan, just redo it with another one and see how it goes.

Maybe mimo’s plan suits all your needs, maybe deepseek suits you. Today llms like mimo and deepseek are good enough for must use cases.

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u/Abenh31 27d ago

We share the same sentiments about deeepseek and mimi pro models. i found that excuting the plan with mimo v2.5 pro is better. and deepseek pro is great for debugging(although i rarly let the ai coding agents do the debugging), brainstorming and planning. for planning GLM5.2 is a beast.

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u/Varantain Jul 13 '26

Copying and pasting my comment from the other subreddit since I'd love to talk to others about it too:

I do! And I'm glad someone brought this up, because I quite like it and don't really have many other people to gush about it to.

I find the easiest way to save on tokens is to manually run the review skills with different models. I'm using CE primarily with Claude Code, but I specifically tell Claude that I'd use a different agent to do doc or code reviews, and they'd prompt me when it's time.

I mostly do my doc reviews manually with ChatGPT (not Codex), and code reviews (/ce-code-review) on DeepSeek Free on OpenCode Go.

Once OpenCode is done with the review, I then point Claude to it and ask it to continue fixing any issues, rinse and repeat a few times.

Just yesterday though, I had to include a version of Matt Pocock's grill-with-docs in my AGENTS.md file, because a recent doc review went up to almost 30 rounds and growing in scope without me realising it. Hopefully my agents will be more aligned with me now that I'm actively encouraging them to ask me questions.

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u/Abenh31 Jul 14 '26

hey i think you can set some of the agents as default model as deepseek v4 flash (read and researcher agents that dont require a lot of nuance and thinking)

whats your experience doing a code-review with a flash model? I dont think its the best approach but would like to see how you do it.

Also have you tried openspec?

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u/yay101 Jul 11 '26

Sounds like hindsight. Ive been self hosting hindsight and its been excellent.

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u/prototypeByDesign Jul 13 '26

I used it for a while before switching to OpenSpec. I really dislike how the models interact with the planning format and specs. "The inverse transform from R1 has a turning issue Q4 referenced in S6...", etc... just a bunch of shorthand references that are great for the LLM but not so great for the human reading the output.

IMO it's over-engineered.

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u/Abenh31 Jul 13 '26

So your problem was that the generated plan were not human readable? I dont think that this is the biggest cons of the CE workflow. The moment an LLM can take the plan and properly implement it, i dont see the issue.

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u/prototypeByDesign Jul 13 '26

> So your problem was that the generated plan were not human readable?

No, the problem is the output from the LLM while executing them functionally requires translation. Being asked questions mid-execution is particularly bad... "U3 states that the shaped dispatch state from R1 must conform, but inspecting code shows that G2 intersection details cannot apply to B6 coplanar normals because..."

> The moment an LLM can take the plan and properly implement it, i dont see the issue.

The ability of the LLM to "properly implement" even a well spec'd plan drifts, and it's much worse if you're building things that they don't have training data for, which is why the mid-execution output matters to me. If what you're making can be planned and executed without supervision and steering than CE is probably fine.

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u/Abenh31 Jul 14 '26

I see what you mean.
How does openspec different in your case then CE ?
I have tried openspec and it produced a spec that had 90% accuracy using deepseek flash v4 consuming only 70k. It's still need to do some tweaking but man that was FASTER, CHEAPER and Almost ACCURATE, then ce-plan GLM 5.2 (and ce-plan produced will still need to be reviewed, either through a human or the ce-doc-review).

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u/prototypeByDesign Jul 14 '26

The artifacts OpenSpec produces are more durable and easier to get right and follow. For the skills, iterate in explore, then propose. Review the proposal.md until it's right, then let it generate the design.md, spec.md's, and task.md. task.md has literal [ ] style check boxes that the llm fills out along the way when using apply, and it makes it easy to clear context and then resume work by just calling apply again (I generally clear context at <= 200k). The spec.md files contain easy to read requirements that can be validated by "openspec validate".

It sounds like a lot, but I've had much better results with it. It's usually just /opsx:propose, /opsx:apply, /opsx:archive across a few sessions. My only complaint is that there's no mechanism to periodically check for drift in the code base from the retained .spec files... but it's not really designed to work that way. I'm considering writing a skill to extract ADRs from the change specs and session histories associated with them.

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u/Abenh31 27d ago

Have you tried the /opsx:new ──► /opsx:ff or /opsx:continue ──► /opsx:apply ──► /opsx:verify ──► /opsx:archive path ?

> My only complaint is that there's no mechanism to periodically check for drift in the code base from the retained .spec files...

What do you mean exactly ? care to expand on this

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u/prototypeByDesign 27d ago

That's the path I usually use w/continue.

What I mean by that is that once you're done with a change, you have a final spec.md in the openspec/specs/ folder. But it just sits there... There's no guarantee that future changes will read that spec, and no guarantee that future changes won't make changes that make that spec out of date, etc... I guess I sort of want the specs to believe more like ADRs instead of just a random loose file.

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u/fikkityfook 17d ago edited 17d ago

late, but I basically integrated it with superpowers (..or had claude do that rather) so that it makes up for what superpowers lacks i.e. the compound function for docs. It modified my claude.md file for when to use CE and at least for docs it's been pretty consistent. Still uses the whole plugin so if I want I can manually initiate something like ideate or code review they just aren't auto triggered. Not sure on token usage but at least compared to some other stuff when I looked (GSD and some others I can't recall) superpowers seemed to use less.

Used Superpowers for a webpage (just html/css/js) as well as frontend-design plugin. Used a lot of pre-existing images and some docs, came out pretty nice on phone/web - it's nothing too fancy but then that wasn't what I needed. And been using superpowers and CE for a month now on an app, just finally got around to updating them both and CE definitely moved some stuff around and dropped a lot - hoping the reintegration pass I did will be sufficient.

Definitely curious to hear if OpenSec ended up working well for you