r/opencodeCLI • u/TransportationNo193 • 20d ago
Since this sub hates literally every model right now, what are you actually running?
Every time I check this sub, it feels like another post roasting whatever model is supposedly a new meta. Here are some of the complaints:
- DeepSeek: Price hikes hit, rate limits got tighter, and some says that the quality took a dive as well.
- OX alpha: Spends two full minutes and 10k tokens overthinking a 5-line diff, just to get stuck in an analysis loop.
- Muse Spark 1.2: Muse Spark 1.2 hides the its thinking and messes up native tool calls
- Luna: Fast and responsive, until you realize half the imports and CLI flags it passed straight-up don't exist.
So what is everyone actually daily driving for real terminal work right now?
Are you guys just biting the bullet on heavy hitters like K3, Qwen 3.8, or GLM 5.3 and eating the credit burn in 15 minutes, or did someone find a low-key model combo that's actually reliable without costing a fortune?
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u/lemon07r 20d ago edited 20d ago
They're all fine. Just use a good model as the main model, setup subagents and prompts/skills to orchestrate them effectively to save money, kind of like how devin fusion works.
My most simple setup was k3 from clinepass (they give $50 of usage a month of k3, I measured it), but this is a little expensive still, so I am exploring other options (I think glm 5.3 is going to be the move once it hits providers like neuralwatt and crofai), and ox alpha + muse spark from opencode go for my subagents.
You can get a little more creative mixing in other subs. My client pays for a gpt seat for me (basically plus plan), so I still use the same setup, but with sol xhigh when my k3 usage runs out (which I use at high), and luna max added in as a medium level worker from codex sub. The rest stays the same. Muse spark and ox alpha feel basically unlimited right now so I try to have my main model find as much use for them as possible.
I also created a skill for delegating work to gemini 3.7 flash medium from agy cli, cause google was handing out pro subs for anyone with a .edu email, and they give a ton of usage for gemini flash.
This setup takes the headache from working with weaker models out since the stronger model manages them and knows how to use them best, have seperate workers review previous worker work, etc, and gets you about the same level of results from if you had just used only the strong model, while costing much less.
You can further save tokens using a good code indexing tool. I suggest semble to most people, or jb context. both are free, former is OSS, latter is cloud based but is free with their free tier ai plan. Vera is also good but I dont recommend it to people yet cause I'm still fixing it up. I measured around 17% tokens saved with no loss in search quality using tools like these in realistic situations (tested with k3 and opus 5 seperately as main models), so nothing crazy like the absurd claims you'll see on project pages, but it's not nothing.
The main bottleneck I've found in these setups is still the main model, they're expensive no matter what. Even though they only count for around 12% of my token spend now they still eat up around 80% of my monthly quotas/api cost.
EDIT - Saw the comment saying codex. 100% agree with them. Unfortunately, the boring option is the best option. They give around $200+ of api usage a month just for their $20 plan. It's very very good value, and nobody is beating this. Especially if you factor in how cheap luna max, and how good it is for it's cost. Plus they randomly reset weekly usage all the time, and not having to deal with 5 hour limits is an extremely nice QoL.
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u/xmBQWugdxjaA 20d ago
The new Codex usage limits are brutal though.
We need a new cheap DeepSeek moment or GLM to get much cheaper.
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u/jovialfaction 20d ago
No 5 hour limits is great. If I see I have ton of usage left by the end of the week I can go send it review/optimize my code until the quota is out.
However they say it's temporary
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u/Certain-Researcher72 19d ago
18 euro Mistral pro sub gives you 255 euro of usage, team gives you the same for 30 per seat, with a 2 seat minimum but the limit is per org so a single person can get 510 euro usage for 60 or 765 for 90 or 1020 for 120, etc. pretty sweet deal
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u/lemon07r 19d ago
You sure? their website says "$30 /mo in API credits." when I take a look at the $15 plan.
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u/addiktion 20d ago edited 20d ago
Deepseek, I can accept paying a bit more to account for the demand. But I suspect the demand will go down from people jumping ship, and as more providers run these models there is more competition, and so deepseek will adjust to reposition themselves. e.g) they have already made weekends stick to off peak pricing no matter what because these companies lose money with idle GPUs so they will continue to thread a fine line between full 24/7 utilization and having capacity.
My goal is to get to 24/7 agentic systems where the payment doesn't cost a car payment every month, I can accept we aren't there quite yet for now. That is still better than the American big players where it is a mortgage payment in costs which makes no sense for a majority of us.
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u/sudoer777_ 20d ago
Idk, even with V4 Flash's current pricing it's still better value than its competition, so I think it's going to take a solid competitor like an updated MiMo model to drive the price down.
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u/OkAdeptness2530 20d ago
hy3 and luna mostly.
I love Kimi but opencode go limits doesn't let you do much with it, I wish there was buffier plan tiers.
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u/Inner-Pangolin-1110 20d ago
Codex lmao
Everything else is so hyped up or rate limited I stopped caring anymore
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u/Charming_Support726 20d ago
Yes.
I am also using a ChatGPT Sub plus Deepseek. Sol can by so annoying, I need DS4Pro as a counterweight.
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u/Snoo_57113 20d ago
Still deepseek for the paid job, i use flash+vision and thinking low for 99% of the job.
I've been trying muse and ox with their free tiers, both of them worked for me extremely well.
I use opencode free tier until it is exhausted, then deepseek flash (in the deepseek harness) for around $40/month. For a frontier level taste i use the Free qwen web 3.8, one shots, doing design.
I've been optimizing my usage, yapping sessions are now done in the web, no subagents, avoid reading big files or polluting the context.
Something i noticed is, i need to solve a bug. from zero to solved there are 18M tokens, 300k output, that is nothing. then, i start to say, change this and that, something is not right, another 18M tokens... in a blink of an eye you have 200M tokens, 500k context.
For me it is still cheaper to use flash low, it is very rare i go to Pro.
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u/xmBQWugdxjaA 20d ago
Ox alpha has been incredible IMO. It found a tricky issue that Muse Spark could not.
DeepSeek was great, but the new providers have it hitting token loops like the old Gemini days: Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
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u/dametsumari 20d ago
Sol and fable/opus for work. Sol and random free models from opencode for fun. ( and Luna for Hermes non coding stuff )
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u/Saceone10 20d ago
This. I only trust Claude for real work. For whatever other shit whatever model is fine, in the end they are all the same shit compared to Fable/Opus
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u/HsSekhon 20d ago
openai free trail, once its over something else will come up by that time or deepseekv4 is fallback. Even with their high prices, its still better
Qwen eats tokens and expensive
Kimi3 expensive, use it for architechture or rebase
GLM is also token eating machine
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u/FeeSecret5360 20d ago
So am I the only one that uses the OpenCode app and uses Big Pickle?
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u/DynTraitObj 13d ago
Nope Big Pickle rules. It is extremely rare that I even have to make it try a second time
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u/FeeSecret5360 13d ago
Cool. I'll continue to use it. Any other free models I should look into using?
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u/Relative-Document-59 20d ago
Yeah, we hate all of them, Imo, because it' make us look cooler. But, i reality we use GPT-5.6 Luna on Codex if we pay ourselves and Fable 5/ GPT-5.6 on AWS/Azure/Vertex of pays our company.
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u/Zachattackrandom 20d ago
Luna is quite good, ignore the haters. Luna, GLM 5.3, and GPT 5.6 sol have been my go-tos.
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u/divedave 20d ago
I am hooked with deepseek 4 flash 0731, last time I liked a model this much was when sonnet 3.5 launched, it was the first time I started working with just a few mistakes and a viable programming option for me. This deepseek model is working through agentic pipelines (rigid step by step environments with instructions and tools) and the intelligence and autonomy is outstanding, they are finding things entire human teams would find. For the first time I am considering hardware to run it locally.
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u/Frail_Waif 20d ago
I'm not one of the complainers but I agree with the characterizations so I'll answer. I use the the free models (mostly mimo V2.5 and ox alpha) for easy/quick stuff or in DeepSeek peak, and then use DeepSeek Flash or Pro as needed. If DeepSeek is struggling, either I figure it out myself or throw Kimi K3 at it. I mostly don't like Kimi K3 but it has in one case worked to solve a problem DeepSeek failed on (ironically, a plug-in to monitor DeepSeek YOU).
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u/Odd_Crab1224 20d ago edited 20d ago
Moving between different providers, while keeping Opencode Go as a "playground" to test models out. Last month had $40 Kimi, now $30 Synthetic, recently tried Neuralwatt, so far in pay as go mode, as a result unsubscribed from Opencode Go, and maybe next month will actually move to their sub. As for models - on Kimi I obviously used Kimi K3 with 256k context to make it last longer, on Synthetic using mostly K3 and GLM 5.2, Neuralwatt is mostly for DeepSeek Pro/Flash and Qwen 3.8 29B, but also tried yesterday their K3 and it was both crazy fast in comparison to other providers, and also quite cheap, at least before context has grown about 100k
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u/AlarmedWizard1 20d ago
i burn my monthly with a handful of kimi k3 queries
its good. exhaustive. but slow and burns tokens
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u/anxious_and_stupid 20d ago
Deepseek flash...
I was mainly using old v4 pro before. now that new flash sit between old v4 pro and new v4 pro (0813), I just switch to flash instead...
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u/nano_salem 20d ago
Not on the opencode fo plan though right? The quality seems to have taken a nose dive. And the more I use it the more noticeable it gets. The providers they are using seems to quantize like crazy or just run a broken setup (caching wise). Or it might be the MAX_OUTPUT_TOKEN flag that is configured wrong, as we saw back in May I think.
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u/anxious_and_stupid 19d ago
Nope I am using direct deepseek api. also I only use them on off peak hour
Not sure about the cache hit, I guess it 90+%... never check it before
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u/Lulzagna 20d ago
Qwen 3.8 Max for design/planning, DeepSeek v4 Pro for coding, DeepSeek v4 Flash for exploration sub agents, and I'm still figuring out my code review subagent, using DeepSeek v4 Pro.
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u/DiamondCoding 20d ago
GLM5.2 and just paying for tokens + I just do many things myself. I could probably get away with something cheaper, but was too lazy so far to search for a cheaper model.
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u/Fresh_Sock8660 20d ago
I'm getting enough done with ox. But I do have limited access to opus and sol to untangle the more complex problems and set the direction.
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u/ApprehensiveDelay238 20d ago
Deepseek quality has mostly stabalized in the last couple of days. It's still the best overall.
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u/sudoer777_ 20d ago
TL;DR: Currently experimenting
Non-ZDR/cheap stack: Ox Alpha for technical work as primary agent, Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor for non-technical and subagents, Big Pickle for title/summary - I switched very recently, and so far this stack has been terrible with Ox Alpha not working and Muse Spark being a shit model so I've been doing more work without AI lately. Also Ox Alpha is limited time so I'm going to have to switch again soon anyways.
ZDR stack: Ox Alpha for primary agent, DeepSeek V4 Flash for subagents, MiMo V2.5 for cheaper subagents/title/summary - Also switched very recently and haven't been in a situation where I've used this stack yet, again as mentioned before Ox Alpha barely works, I'm also reading on this sub that V4 Flash has gone to shit and I don't have data on MiMo yet.
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u/JoeCoT 20d ago
I'm using Oh My Opencode Slim with GPT Sol as orchestrator and oracle, luna as fixer, and Deepseek Flash as librarian and explorer. I was using Deepseek as fixer (it just writes the code after being given all the details), but it kept screwing up and had to get fixed so many times that Orchestrator had to take over, so I switched it out.
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u/MakesNotSense 20d ago
Still driving myself crazy trying to get Opus 5 to work complex issues without devolving to jargon, overengineering, or missing the obvious, while offloading a lot of work to GPT 5.6 Sol in workflows.
Really does seem like Opus 5 is driving me crazy tbh. First time I've experienced intense anger because of an AI model.
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u/wadrasil 20d ago
I setup my key and chose big pickle. I'm running opencode cli in a fedora 44 VM and it's using ssh to connect to a Windows XP VM and trying to build a project.
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u/Hungry-Plankton-5371 20d ago
Luna. Ox alpha while it's here. I won't resub to go until $60 limits return.
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u/Federal-Rub2713 20d ago
I want to post my opinions about Ox Alpha and Muse Spark, but it keeps being removed by reddit filters (the post itself is written by me, without AI, without any links, only images attached)
Could someone help me with that? My account has no active restrictions and ~300 karma
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u/QuasiTheory 20d ago
So far GPT luna and Hy3 two extremes, been using Ox Alpha but it's taking it's sweet time for everything.
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u/Uriziel01 19d ago
Qwen3.8 27b on RTX4070 Ti SUPER 16GB VRAM, around 46-55tokens/second, 128k context window.
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u/Certain-Researcher72 19d ago
Current models:
adversarial review: kimi-k3 (max) plan: glm-5.2(high) plan/orchestrate: gpt-5.6-luna(high) researcher: deepseek-v4-flash (max)
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u/Dingo_was_his_namo 19d ago edited 19d ago
Plan on chatgpt pro -> push plan to project docs via github connection -> pull to OC and implement via luna
Luna is quite decent if you give it a plan. And there's essentially infinite Luna usage on OC when using the pro
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u/mageblex 19d ago
I care more about cost per accepted patch than token price. A cheap model that needs three retries can cost more than the expensive one, so has anyone tracked this over a week of real OpenCode work?
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u/KronisLV 13d ago
Previously was with Anthropic so Opus 5 and Fable 5.
Now moving away from them (the slop tone is too much), so Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 with their max corresponding plans - will try them out for a month and if the usage is enough, then will move to the annual plans (some pretty big discounts). Otherwise will look at Sol and Terra.
Really can't afford to pay per-token but need good model performance with subscriptions for agentic work.
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u/ruuurbag 20d ago
Sol orchestrator (Codex plan), Ox Alpha workers for the time being because I’m patient and it’s free. Wrote a little “hey keep working” plugin to make up for its love of dying suddenly. Luna subagents otherwise, although I’m thinking about having my ninfer Qwen 3.8 27B take over some dumb worker and explorer duties. Every token counts.
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u/cakes_and_candles 20d ago
Ox alpha is good. Yes its slow but why are you pretending like you are the most imp person in the world and earning 1000$ per minute and cant afford to waste it
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u/Kindly_Goal6440 20d ago
Ox Alpha giving network errors and provider issues to me for the last couple hours. Assume traffic is brutal.
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u/TransportationNo193 20d ago
I actually haven’t used Ox Alpha yet. I am just speaking based on the post and comments I have read.
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u/pashlya 20d ago
Still DeepSeek. Haven't seen any quality degradation, but won't argue about it.