I feel that a better title for this article would be: "Some minor annoyances that, when fixed, would improve OpenCode"<p># Prompt Cache Misses<p>> It globs your filesystem and re-reads AGENTS.md (injected in turn-0 system prompt) on every SSE turn. If you put a quick note in AGENTS.md to be read in the next session, you immediately force a full re-evaluation.<p>> Personal favourite: it puts the current date in the turn-0 system prompt and re-evaluates every SSE turn. If you’re using OpenCode at midnight you get a full prompt cache miss.<p>Okay, I can live with those.<p># Compaction<p>>
Want to sit for 10 minutes while the LLM server prefills the entire session with a new prompt prefixed to it, just to turn it into 5 bullet points that go at the top of a new session? Me neither. I get what they are going for, but I’ve not seen it work well. Neither compaction nor pruning is implemented well, and they interact poorly.<p>Is this an OpenCode specific issue? I've seen the same with Codex and Claude<p># System Prompts<p>> The default system prompt is opinionated (fine) but it has shit opinions (not fine). It took me a while to figure out why my agent kept saying “Use ABSOLUTELY NO COMMENTS” when dispatching subagents.<p>Okay, so change it? Any LLM is opinionated, this system prompt enforces consistency across different models which seems reasonable.
The bigger point is that the codebase is hopelessly bloated by vibe coded features at this point, mirroring the same problems with Claude Code. And stability, performance, memory use have all gotten terrible.<p>I liked Opencode a lot previously but there's no doubt it's not well-written software. Pi has fully replaced it for me and there are quite a few newer options that learned from Opencode and exercise more minimalism where it matters
I keep seeing these conceptual complaints about OpenCode but it's unreasonably effective, so it's difficult to justify any time spent in changing to something else.<p>It hardly matters that it's vibe coded and ugly if it works well... and it does (for me).<p>Saving a few CPU cycles and reducing RAM utilization on my local system isn't going to meaningfully improve anything in and of itself; the wall time is all bounded by the model or by the code it's invoking (i.e. compiling or running the test suite).
Got a link? Pi is suitably as to make search engines questionable
For the future, adding the related concepts/themes around hard to search for terms tend to do the trick. Instead of searching "go" for example, do "go programming language". Or instead of "pi", do "pi agent" or even "pi llm".
pi.dev
I am on this trajectory too; opencode got me started but I tried to understand the way it is working and to do that I would normally read the source code, but the source code is really not fun.
This seems to be quite common. You start with OpenCode (assuming you're someone who skips all the Claude Code hype); then you start thirsting for more, and switch to oh-my-pi.<p>I generally view the kind of code in projects like OpenCode to be the same as binary machine code, and the harness that works on it is the compiler. The source code is the prompts (I guess), except we live in a weird state now we use the existing machine code + more prompts to make even more machine code.
Can you name a few? I'm looking for alternatives
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Hey! I work on OpenCode, so thank you for this measured reply ;)<p>Just wanted to add a few things:<p>- We actually don't do tool-call pruning any more. But compaction is a necessary evil for the time being. There's only so much context window, and if you wish to keep working on the same task for a long time, the model needs to summarize its current progress so it can continue without hitting its token ceiling.<p>- With V2 (in beta atm), we have a new system for handling changing system instructions (AGENTS.md files, available skills, etc.) that avoids cache misses at all costs, while still giving the robot the newest information. I recorded a little video about it here:<p><a href="https://x.com/kitlangton/status/2075749116760457346/video/1" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/kitlangton/status/2075749116760457346/video/1</a>
Just checked out the video...you, my friend, could be a professional voice actor (assuming that job still exists in the future).
Can you shed some light on what's the deal with the new interface (web/desktop)?<p>I updated one of my opencode containers today and had to downgrade it back because:<p>1. Worktree/workspace support is gone altogether. No way for agent to work in parallel on different things safely except prompting it directly to create a worktree.<p>2. Seeing multiple sessions properly now requires opening tabs for those?<p>3. In general, switching between several projects/sessions/whatever stopped working, and command palette is hotkey-only.<p>Issues about the new design just sit in an endless unsolved pile on GitHub which seems hopeless. And an agressive stale bot is not helping with that.<p>I came to OpenCode because it seemed hackable and simple, and at this point it seems like a "move fast break a lot" project that you got to live with.<p>(rant over, sorry if this is addressed to the wrong person, just needed to vent a bit)
Yeah it's a big change.<p>Workspace support is being worked on, it was half-implemented before, so we are taking a proper pass at it now.<p>For switching between sessions, can you tell me about your workflow from before? Because a tab can hold a session from any project. Are you saying that opening up a tab is too heavy of an action?<p>GitHub issues though has been a problem from us, we deal with a ton of noise/spam.
Does V2 finally imminentize the eschaton? V1 has completely failed at this so far
> I feel that a better title for this article would be: "Some minor annoyances that, when fixed, would improve OpenCode"<p>Those are labeled as "annoying things"<p>Read also the "alarming things"
This article has several sections and you are commenting on things under the section titled "Annoying Things".<p>There is another section titled "Alarming Things", with a subsection titled "It’s Fucking Full of RCEs". (Those are RCEs other than those which simply derive from the issues pointed out in previous subsections).
>> > The default system prompt is opinionated (fine) but it has shit opinions (not fine). It took me a while to figure out why my agent kept saying “Use ABSOLUTELY NO COMMENTS” when dispatching subagents.<p>So that's why OpenCode likes to randomly remove my comments.
Opinionated system prompts forcing this are awful. It's similar to putting "ALWAYS INDENT WITH TABS" in the system prompt, but worse, because "self-documenting code" is a convenient lie lazy developers like to propagate.<p>I have the following in my instructions, but I often need to remind agents of it because they follow the shitty system prompt instructions:<p>"ALWAYS include MANY inline code comments describing what blocks of code are supposed to be doing. Inline comments serve as inline specification, a parity check between the code and the specification, and are a means to _communicate_ with all future programmers, including yourself. Write Once, Read Many. The code needs to talk to whomever is looking at it in natural language."
Cache Misses are pretty bad, i have a locally running deepseek v4 flash, i have tuned it now to have 1100-1300 prefill. Its not great but properly useable. Imagine having a session with already 100k and half of it has to be prefilled it would be waiting minutes with worse numbers. And if you are paying by the token, for hosted models, you are wasting money.
# Prompt Cache Misses<p>> It globs your filesystem and re-reads AGENTS.md (injected in turn-0 system prompt) on every SSE turn. If you put a quick note in AGENTS.md to be read in the next session, you immediately force a full re-evaluation.<p>> Personal favourite: it puts the current date in the turn-0 system prompt and re-evaluates every SSE turn. If you’re using OpenCode at midnight you get a full prompt cache miss.<p>I used opencode with deepseek v4 via openrouter during the weekend. Openrouter claims a cache hit rate of about 95%. Maybe it can be improved, but it doesn't seem broken.<p>I agree that it is bloated, and uses a lot of memory and cpu. But I don't remember seeing any bug during its usage, or at least not big enough to notice
Definitely agree on the title. Also could have worked as 'Some minor annoyances that, when fixed, would improve OpenCode. Also, I don't like AI"
I actually share that opinion of no comment from LLMs. I just dont want to read them. So as usual, an opinion is… an opinion.
Comments sometimes help the LLM think through a problem. They are particularly useful if you have thinking disabled, eg. it's not uncommon to run Qwen3.6 locally, but its thinking is extremely verbose, so it's fast if you disable thinking, but doing that will sometimes cause it to think a little in comments, and if you disable that too, then it will produce worse output.<p>Comments can always be stripped reliably later.
IMO, if you "put a quick note in AGENTS.md" then you should expect a cache miss.<p>I think that is reasonable and intuitive.<p>That was the first complaint I came across in the article and it made me question the level of indignation of the whole thing.
> <i>I feel that a better title for this article would be: "Some minor annoyances that, when fixed, would improve OpenCode"</i><p>> <i>If you don’t know what OpenCode is, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The boot is made of TypeScript and the face is everything we have learned about security and systems software since the invention of the electronic computer in the 1940s.</i><p>Regardless if that's a good or bad take, I'd like titles on HN to reflect what the author wanted to say and not editorialized to what HN readers think the article <i>should</i> be saying.
I always run opencode with envvar `OPENCODE_DISABLE_AUTOCOMPACT=1` because I discover a new horrible bug in its autocompact every time I don't... including the config .json option to turn off autocompact not working.<p>Sad but not surprised to hear about all these other issues. I like opencode, it does plenty right but plenty wrong.
When I looked into opencode a few months ago I was struck by the default system prompt which came across as messy and random, iirc it also contained a typo or two. It made me look elsewhere and I didn't look back.
> > The default system prompt is opinionated (fine) but it has shit opinions (not fine). It took me a while to figure out why my agent kept saying “Use ABSOLUTELY NO COMMENTS” when dispatching subagents.<p>> Okay, so change it? Any LLM is opinionated, this system prompt enforces consistency across different models which seems reasonable.<p>OpenCode embeds scatters bad coding policy all over <i>all</i> of its inbuilt prompts, including tool instructions. The only way I've found to fix them is to edit the source code. And, yes, they're also huge and repetitive.<p>A framework's native prompts should include <i>only</i> information about how to interact with the framework itself.
That's the thing. You can't change it. They do not accept PRs from what I've seen. Whilst it's open source it's only in name. There may be the odd PR accepted from outside the team. But very very rarely.<p>It's honestly embarrassing to call this open source.<p>Pi on the other hand, whilst they have their own unique issues with PRs, if you came to them with a genuine problem, or fix, they seem to accept it.<p>Now I point back to those issues you pointed out, all have PRs... Unmerged. Same with the infinite depth subagent calling.
Open source doesn't mean that it has to accept PRs. It has never meant that the code author's must accept community contributors.<p>OpenCode has an MIT license, which allows you to copy/fork the code and modify it how you see fit.<p>Please review the open source initiative's definition of open source: <a href="https://opensource.org/osd" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/osd</a>
SQLite famously doesn't accept PRs either, and it's public domain.
I pinged the OC devs to get someone else's PR merged to fix a slop artifact, they did indeed merge external PRs.<p>Like many popular Ai projects, they get 1000s of slop PRs. They are also working on a v2, so fixes to old code are much less likely to land now.
This is a good summary of the dangers of using agentic clis, but the title & general focus on opencode is odd for two reasons:<p>1. Most obviously & importantly this is a complaint without a straightforward suggested alternative. A sibling commenter mentions suggesting fixes to Opencode would be more productive: I don't necessarily agree since many of these issues are fundamental & would likely require an almost ground up rethink & rewrite, but the issue is that the article contains no constructive proposal at all: it may as well be titled "Stop Using LLMs"<p>2. None of the major issues listed are unique to OpenCode. At least the full list within the "Alarming Things" seems in my mind to apply to Claude CLI, & I would guess most other agents from frontier model providers.<p>Granted it's worthwhile documenting these issues as a plea for someone to build better tooling from the ground up, so the article is far from worthless - on the contrary I've bookmarked it & will be sharing & referencing it widely & often. But the title & focus is just very odd & seems misguided, especially when the contents of the piece is otherwise so good.
> If you don’t know what OpenCode is, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The boot is made of TypeScript and the face is everything we have learned about security and systems software since the invention of the electronic computer in the 1940s.<p>I nominate this for a Bulwer-Lytton prize in the Tortured Metaphor category.
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."<p>George Orwell, 1984
If you don't know what OpenCode is, imagine a dark and stormy night.
perhaps if the boot were Rust it would crumble in the face of Bare Metal
As tortured as you will feel after using OpenCode!
This prose feels extremely angry and ungenerous; abstractly, I agree with a lot of the points, but when I read this:<p>> My conclusion is that OpenCode is clown-car turboslop with a security posture of “let me bend over for you daddy”. Everyone using it should stop using it.<p>I do not want to keep reading. There are regular people who wrote this software. When did it become normal to talk about open source like this? How would you feel if someone wrote this about some software that you wrote? Reading this article made me feel extremely gross
I agree with your sentiment, but to answer your question: Since forever. (At least I know examples in the 90's).<p>In the old days of comp.lang.lisp, there were certain individuals who would really get off on denigrating people who wrote code that was not up to their ivory tower level. Some people left because of it. Others took it as a badge of honor falsely believing that the dressing down was necessary for them to improve their coding skills.<p>Example of an old discussion on HN about it:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=587045">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=587045</a>
Calling something "vibe-coded" nowadays is a permission slip to unload on it with hyperbole and insults because you can presume there's no human in the line of fire. I really don't think the people engaging in that kind of rhetoric understand how corrosive it is to the humans who <i>do</i> get caught in the crossfire sometimes, and to themselves for normalizing that kind of behavior.
I found this part funny.<p>> People familiar with OpenCode internals (if you are on the OpenCode dev team I assume this doesn’t include you) might have objected to my python3 example above.
It's funny though. I haven't contributed to OpenCode but if I had I'd still laugh because I have a sense of humor. Don't take everything so seriously.
I promise I'm not normally uptight like this, but there's a difference between having a laugh and whatever this is. Like I said, this feels (a) legitimately angry and (b) in a spit flecked enraged way that has become popular. I guess if you're cool with people calling whatever you work on clown-car turboslop then more power to you.
> When did it become normal to talk about open source like this?<p>It's not normal today, but it's also not new, that kind of language has been around for a long time.
> When did it become normal to talk about open source like this?<p>Why does something being open source absolve it of any sins?
I mean, unless you think AI is conscious and would feel hurt by this, who exactly is harmed here? The prompters? Why? They obviously know the code generated by AI is slop, why would they be hurt by these comments?
I use CC at a client because that's their stack. I use (a particular version of) OpenCode for my own work, because it is so much better. Reading this post makes me sad.<p>Because everything matches and explains oddities I've seen and forgiven. So despite the hyperbole and the places where the authors' general sentiment are not mine, he's basically right, and I need to find a different harness.<p>If the post resonates for you too and you've found something better, happy for recommendations. pi seems to get the most mentions here, anyone feel it (or another option) is specifically better on these architectural aspects?
Regardless of its flaws, OpenCode is the harness I’ve been the most productive with by far, and I’ve tried them all.<p>These are all just some minor annoyances, some disagreements, and most importantly, a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of command filtering. It is not for security, it’s for steering.<p>Anyway, it didn’t sound like the author tried building anything with OpenCode, and if they did, they said nothing about the most important part: how well did it do?
>Regardless of its flaws, OpenCode is the harness I’ve been the most productive with by far, and I’ve tried them all.<p>I feel the same way. It's the right amount of 'gets out of my way' and 'won't nuke my machine'.<p>Especially the ease of using Plan mode and quickly getting stuff done.
I switched from OpenCode to Pi and there was a big improvement in terms of tool calling performance and I find the experience less buggy.<p>OpenCode has also seemed to have disappeared from <a href="https://openrouter.ai/apps/category/coding" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/apps/category/coding</a>
OpenCode requested to be removed from OpenRouter rankings: <a href="https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/11926#issuecomment-3848024835" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/11926#issuecomm...</a>
> I switched from OpenCode to Pi and there was a big improvement in terms of tool calling performance and I find the experience less buggy.<p>That's not because OpenCode is bad, but because Pi is good. I can say the same about Claude vs pi.
How you deal with LSP? One of the best things in OpenCode is LSP integration.
> How you deal with LSP? One of the best things in OpenCode is LSP integration.<p>I would love to learn how LSP helps you. I did various basic evals with LSP and I did not find it to improve the agent performance at all. Maybe on newer models this gets better because they are now RLing with LSP in the context, but at least in the past having a commit hook that runs lints and typecheck at the end, is more token efficient than having every edit be injected extra LSP results. You are almost guaranteed to be wasting tokens since partial edits are unlikely going to result in type checks passing.<p>(Disclaimer: I work on Pi)
lsp integration isn't for checks like that.<p>It's for using lsp to do things like symbol renames. It's cheaper to call an LSP server to do those kind of simple refactors than to spend tokens on the model doing it.<p>It can also use LSP to build context without having to grep around a ton. You don't have to grep and hten pull lines and make guesses for a function. You just ask the LSP for it.<p>How helpful all that is is heavily dependent on the quality of the language server so usefulness is varies wildly between languages
> It's for using lsp to do things like symbol renames. It's cheaper to call an LSP server to do those kind of simple refactors than to spend tokens on the model doing it.<p>Is OpenCode pushing the LLM into doing these refactors via LSP? I found that making these refactors with ast-grep is quite efficient.<p>> It can also use LSP to build context without having to grep around a ton. You don't have to grep and hten pull lines and make guesses for a function. You just ask the LSP for it.<p>I guess I was not particularly successful with having the agent actually do that. I think what fff is attempting to do (with fuzzy expansion of slightly inaccurate greps) results in better results to me, but even that is debatable.<p>To be fair, we do not have evals for this today, but we're generally looking into token efficiency and how likely models are at using tools the right way, and we did not find a ton of evidence of LSP helping, even for finding data.<p>But I would love to see some sessions from people where they have success with LSP data for either refactoring or looking up, because this would be super useful to better understand out blind spots.
To be fair in every harness I've ever used that has LSP support, they never actually utilize the LSP for more deterministic refactoring tools. And even then when I do enable the LSP in many harnesses oftentimes it doesn't even use it at all.<p>Maybe they haven't been taught to do so or it's not integrated into the system prompt or the tools but all of them only ever use the LSP to read files/symbols.<p>Every harness I've used will happily just call the edit tool over and over or do a find and replace via sed or programatically call a python/perl script rather than rename a symbol via other means.
LSP helps massively with some models.<p>It sounds a lot like you are focused on using Pi as a OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper when that isn’t your audience. (Hint: raw token usage is less of a concern).
Oh My Pi has it. I'm a big OMP shill right now. Seems not very popular, but it has the stability of Pi with the features Opencode (and more I think; OMP has web browsing and a more advanced edit system too). OMP often outperforms Claude Code and Codex for me.
I haven't tried it myself but there seems to be an extension for this: <a href="https://pi.dev/packages/pi-lsp" rel="nofollow">https://pi.dev/packages/pi-lsp</a>
I disliked OpenCode's LSP integration, as Pyright kept distracting the model from what I wanted done in a Django project. I prefer to run MyPy at my own convenience
I use a forked version of the pi-lsp. It works pretty well out of the box, but I just tend to fork extensions by default and then hack them up how i see fit.
I tried opencode and pi recently.<p>Having come from Claude code, I was a bit shocked that both seem to allow edits by default with no confirmation dialog.<p>One IIRC allows you to enable it in config and the other needs a plugin.
<i>> Having come from Claude code, I was a bit shocked that both seem to allow edits by default with no confirmation dialog.</i><p>There are confirmation dialogs in OpenCode. You can configure them using the permission config, same as Claude Code. Having said that, as a general rule, none of these harnesses are safe to run on your local file system.
I purged OpenCode when I noticed it downloads npm packages in the background without asking the users first. This exposes higher risk of supply chain attach risk.
Kilo is the top 3 option there, and that's a fork of OpenCode.
yeah I noticed it missing on the openrouter leaderboard -- very interested to know what that's about
I find it absurd that a TUI desktop app is heavier than a native one AND heavier than most browser based desktop apps, it's so much waste of RAM, CPU, energy/battery just to show text.<p>I've been working on my own AI harness/chat in C++ Qt6[1] and it's lighter than anything else even with lots of features like sub-agents, code diff, terminal emulator, simple editor, markdown preview, translucent background, custom themes, permissions, MCP, git integration(commits, stage, diffs), dock system to move elements and tabs for projects; but it's not released yet as I want to polish it a bit, remove a few bugs I found and simplify the UI.<p>[1]: <a href="https://zeteo.krysoph.com/preview.html" rel="nofollow">https://zeteo.krysoph.com/preview.html</a>
Including the date in the system prompt - at the cost of a cache invalidation at midnight - is an entirely reasonable decision. Most other harnesses do the same thing.<p>Including the full datetime would be irresponsible, but that's not what OpenCode does.
It felt unreasonable when I was using it at midnight and had to wait 10 minutes to refill the KV cache on my local GPU :-)<p>A simple solution here would be to evaluate the date once per session, or once each time the `opencode` binary is launched (to avoid old, long-running sessions getting stuck in the past).
not too much actionable here. most of the more glaring issues are already fixed in our upcoming v2 if you'd like to try beta: <a href="https://x.com/thdxr/status/2075636594640376165" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thdxr/status/2075636594640376165</a><p>some things mention are outdated - particularly the tool call pruning feature. this has been disabled by default for a while specifically because of complaints like this<p>when we looked through our data it's not so clear cut that it's net negative
<a href="https://x.com/thdxr/status/2048268697790300343" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thdxr/status/2048268697790300343</a><p>also i'm pretty excited about our new system prompt approach - can define each component in a way that avoids busting the cache when they change. eg that midnight issue: <a href="https://x.com/thdxr/status/2070721003924103651" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thdxr/status/2070721003924103651</a><p>providers (anthropic is the first) are supporting this as a native concept
Are there sandboxes you typically use?<p>I think the biggest concern from the article would be the open http server, and things like the fetched arbitrary command execution here: <a href="https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/22191" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/22191</a><p>Was that issue addressed? The comment where it was marked as closed suggested it "needed more testing" but didn't have any linked PRs.<p>Gemini translates the closing comment as "We are closing this ticket after a quick look. The login issue is either caused by a wrong setting/external provider, or it's a deeper problem that requires someone to dig into the backend Go server code directly."
> The default system prompt is opinionated (fine) but it has shit opinions (not fine). It took me a while to figure out why my agent kept saying “Use ABSOLUTELY NO COMMENTS” when dispatching subagents.<p>GAH!!! So that's why its been deleting comments. That is annoying as hell.<p>FWIW though, I think this applies to other harnesses also (not the annoying bits, but the security risks). I was thinking this morning about how much of a supply-chain vulnerability these tools are. Like, basically, they have a ton of data, they're updated practically daily, and given their vibe coded nature I <i>really</i> doubt anyone is auditing the 10,000 NPM dependencies they drag in. It really will just take one left-pad incident for this to be an absolute disaster.
> Textual command filtering is entirely useless. It is fit for no purpose. Nobody with any instinct or experience in security would even bother to implement this filter because it achieves nothing except a false sense of security.<p>Not if you only use an allow list. E.g. only allow things matching a particular prefix to run. Also, isn't this what every agent does? And by every I mean Codex because I haven't used the others.
The other day I upgraded my pi.dev coding harness and was testing with Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B model on my Laptop and noticed there was a slight drop in performance from the earlier version I used though the agent worked as expected. Any slight changes in the system prompts will have impact on performance and this is understandable as LLMs are non deterministic. This is the case with any harness including OpenCode. Giving coding harness its own environment (Container/VM) is the best way forward as the article denounces. Running coding agent harness without sufficient guardrails is like sitting on a time bomb. Using AI slop guardrails is still better than having no guardrails.
I haven't independently verified all the claims in the article, but as a codex, Claude, and opencode user, opencode is easily my favorite harness. From a user perspective it's a dream
A more accurate title would be "The Problem with AI Agent Harnesses, and small annoyances with OpenCode specifically"
This is an anti AI post masquerading as an anti opencode port.<p>Nevertheless I'm curious what people might suggest to use instead with local models.
I agree generally but I'd moderate this to say this is an "anti- the current state of AI" post insofar as none of the issues listed are inherent to LLMs, they just seem to be ubiquitous in the current generation of agentic CLIs. I'm not aware of any CLI that doesn't have the listed severe issues, but I could certainly write a CLI myself (if I had the time & energy) that avoided these issues.
Maybe <a href="https://github.com/tontinton/maki" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tontinton/maki</a>
> <i>- Sensible permission system - when the agent runs git diff && rm -rf /, what do you think will happen in your current coding agent? It will treat it as git *. Maki uses tree-sitter to parse the bash command and figure out the permissions requested are git * and rm *. Disable using --yolo.</i><p>This sounds identical to what OpenCode does (&, contrary to their own marketing, does not seem sensible at all).<p>The fact that this mechanism is so primitive across all agentic clis is frankly a serious indictment of the competence & experience behind LLM-focused development teams.<p>This is a security issue that has in the past been solved via explicit file-path-based allowlisting, & more recently - due to file-path matching being deemed insufficiently secure - apps have been switching to cryptographically signed binary matching as a more modern alternative to the less secure path matching. In that context, the fact these recently-written "modern" agentic clis are using a method that's more basic & even less secure than the "old insecure" method most apps use is pretty shocking.
Elsewhere in the thread someone linked to <a href="https://pleasedonotescape.com/" rel="nofollow">https://pleasedonotescape.com/</a> which is a list of sandboxes<p>Maybe sandboxing isn't the job for an agent harness?<p>Maybe choosing a VM as your sandbox, with access only to project directory.. and then enabling YOLO mode on the agent, is the way to go.<p>And in any case, for an agent that can write and run code, no allowlist for which programs are allowed to run is sufficient, since the agent can just write the code the program would run anyway. And the issue isn't which software the agent runs, but whether they inherit the same ambient authority as your user - read the same files as you do, modify your config files, etc. Running in a VM stops that.<p>Clawk (recently submitted to HN here <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892859">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892859</a>) might be good
I've run agentic CLIs in a sandbox (using MacOS sandbox-exec) & in VMs - both solutions have an inherent advantage over any integrated sandboxing by virtue of their independence (even before we get into configurability). Claude CLI integrates sandbox-exec internally, but I can't really trust it completely because Anthropic don't really have any vested interest in restricting their own tooling on my machine - they want me to rely on the tooling more, not less, which naturally entails granting the tool broader access: this is reflected in two ways in their sandbox-exec implementation: (1) it's wrapped in a relatively lax default profile & (2) not everything the cli does is sandbox-wrapped.<p>All that said, I don't think I'd agree that sandboxing doesn't belong in the agent harness. Ultimately, I want to be using an open source cli tool that doesn't come with the above Anthropic perverse incentives. The advantage of using a separate sandbox solution with Claude CLI isn't that it's separate, it's that I control it. Ideally I should control my agentic cli though, & in that context, bundling the sandbox comes with a lot of inherent advantages.<p>Unfortunately, as far as I've seen, the current batch of open source clis are pretty poor at the above, leaving little incentive to switch from proprietary solutions.
I really, really wanted to make agent sandboxes work. Filed issues on the sandbox created by Anthropic and later also adopted by Copilot, and also to Codex repository. I think none of them is actually usable - they either allow too much or too little.<p>There is one case where VMs are not fit, and it's when you need to do GPU work. Well unless you have gpu passthrough or virtual gpus.
I've used VMs because dealing with tool access is infinitely simpler & less fraught than tailoring sandbox profiles, but ultimately using sandbox-exec has yielded better workflows (if & when I've gotten an appropriate profile stood up). The sandbox tends to have a lot more rough edges than the VM, so I do switch back & forth between VM & sandbox, but I suspect a good sandbox-wrapping implementation with nice ux is the future.<p>Perhaps one could go further & combine them: e.g. a sanbox-wrapped on-host CLI that subshells/subagents out to VMs on demand. Seems potentially overcomplicated but I guess one can dream.
> The fact that this mechanism is so primitive across all agentic clis is frankly a serious indictment of the competence & experience behind LLM-focused development teams.<p>Not at all. The proper solution to this problem is running in a sandbox - which is not reinvented by the LLM harness because there are already many great options.<p>You misunderstand the mechanism. It is not intended to provide security. It is intended to guide LLM behavior.
OpenCode is pretty awesome. The article appears written by someone who couldn’t handle a glance behind the curtain and definitely should not research how sausages are made.
> My conclusion is that OpenCode is clown-car turboslop with a security posture of “let me bend over for you daddy”<p>My type of writing.
I’m not really here to defend opencode (or bash it, who has the time?), but in setting up SDD paired with the right tools to both make deterministic black boxes out of certain actions, paired with subagents. I have ran with opencode and qwen 3.2 on a 5090 and I’m getting results on a production codebase of golang where a review of changes from Claude had no changes but acceptance of the solution.<p>I may be missing some aspect of where the local llm’s are losing, but I’m content with draining my local tokens and treating the frontier models like a less junior SWE.
I am afraid this is a very click-baity title. I actually opened the article and thought I would learn something from it.<p>Instead what I read was typical issues about Agentic CLI's in general dubbed as `alarming`. I would have been happy if the title was just `Annoying` which a lot of `OpenCode` is. But adding the `alarming` made it what it became, something that attracts enough eyeballs to get to the front page of HN.
Heavy disagree. I can't be sure about other AI coding agents as I haven't used others enough, but especially the items around prompt cache misses and compaction have hit me personally.<p>This article (combined with another article previously comparing CC and OC's system prompt, to which someone replied pi.dev sends even less) has made me want to switch agents, so I'm likely going to try out pi.dev and aim to migrate.
I don't know whether other arguments are true, but some arguments in the end are right:<p>> Using LLMs for code generation feels like a dead end. ..., This is hostile to your ability to understand your code, beyond the fact that you didn’t write it.<p>What you get from AI is not worth of what you have invested for it in long period.<p>> Drawing answers directly from knowledge in model weights leads to hallucination even for multi-trillion-parameter models, so why bother making them that big?<p>Current AI is like the film company producing TV series or movies. "If similar stories do not exist or details are missing, screenwriters use imagination to fill in the gaps (remember hallucination? It's just a makeup.)", refer to the article <a href="https://devcyc.life/current-ai-is-like-the-film-company-producing-tv-series-or-movies/" rel="nofollow">https://devcyc.life/current-ai-is-like-the-film-company-prod...</a>
Good sentiment, wrong target. I took some liberties to fix the beginning:<p>> If you don’t know what AI is, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The boot is made of shit and the face is everything we have learned about security and systems software since the invention of the electronic computer in the 1940s.
The solution is not to use docker to sandbox Opencode. It is to use flatpak/bubblewrap/flatseal.<p>I have vscode running in flatpak with directory permissions handled by flatseal. Vscode only has access to my dev folders and nothing else. Even the git bundled by vscode cannot call git push because of this (vscode doesn't have permission to read ~/.ssh!).<p>It's an easy sandbox that's provided free of charge courtesy of bubblewrap/flatpak.<p>As someone who uses opencode regularly, the quip about it asking for permission to read logs in /tmp after already writing to the directory is pretty funny.
When using local only models, OpenCode uploaded prompts and other data, to remote server to generate session titles, with some free tier model.<p>Useless, if you are dealing with privacy compliance and tons of legal requirements.
When i use local models with OpenCode, ClaudeCode or Pi, I just switch off internet just in case, and it works ok, no complains.
Re local LLMs: “You avoid the uncanny valley where the model appears to be intelligent before doing something stupid; the stupidity is self-evident and this helps calibrate your interactions.”<p>Making the authors stance on LLMs clear.
Admittedly I prefer Hermes and oh-my-pi, but most of this post is just hyperbole
Lost me at the very first sentence.<p>> If you don’t know what OpenCode is, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
Thanks for that, I've been using it but some of these are bad. Specially that it sends data to the cloud by default for session titles, since I use my local model exclusively. So I'm done with it, trying maki now which seems promising and it's so much lighter.
Related post of mine: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946283">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946283</a>
For some reason OpenCode doesn't find my local models through LM Studio. Instead it shows three other models that I don't have.
I guess I should add the models myself in opencode.json, but I generally dislike hardcoding things when computers are really good at listing things. The model list is right there in the API, please just use it.
Interesting article. What are the alternatives that address the issues raised?
I see some folk recommending <a href="https://pi.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://pi.dev/</a>.
Has anyone used <a href="https://aider.chat/" rel="nofollow">https://aider.chat/</a> and liked it?
Their "OpenCode" naming is controversial too.<p>Quoting moozilla's comment 11 months ago (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741894">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741894</a>):<p>---<p>If anyone is curious on the context:
<a href="https://x.com/thdxr/status/1933561254481666466" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thdxr/status/1933561254481666466</a> <a href="https://x.com/meowgorithm/status/1933593074820891062" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/meowgorithm/status/1933593074820891062</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCJBbVJ_wP0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCJBbVJ_wP0</a><p>Gemini summary of the above:<p>- Kujtim Hoxha creates a project named TermAI using open-source libraries from the company Charm.<p>- Two other developers, Dax (a well-known internet personality and developer) and Adam (a developer and co-founder of Chef, known for his work on open-source and developer tools), join the project.<p>- They rebrand it to OpenCode, with Dax buying the domain and both heavily promoting it and improving the UI/UX.<p>- The project rapidly gains popularity and GitHub stars, largely due to Dax and Adam's influence and contributions.<p>- Charm, the company behind the original libraries, offers Kujtim a full-time role to continue working on the project, effectively acqui-hiring him.<p>- Kujtim accepts the offer. As the original owner of the GitHub repository, he moves the project and its stars to Charm's organization. Dax and Adam object, not wanting the community project to be owned by a VC-backed company.<p>- Allegations surface that Charm rewrote git history to remove Dax's commits, banned Adam from the repo, and deleted comments that were critical of the move.<p>- Dax and Adam, who own the opencode.ai domain and claim ownership of the brand they created, fork the original repo and launch their own version under the OpenCode name.<p>- For a time, two competing projects named OpenCode exist, causing significant community confusion.<p>- Following the public backlash, Charm eventually renames its version to Crush, ceding the OpenCode name to the project now maintained by Dax and Adam.
This could be a series of issues on the opencode repo
Currently 3690 open issues.<p><a href="https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues</a>
yes, and they could all be closed by the stale bot
There are a ton of super serious issues there. They are not getting fixed.
60 days ago there were 73 pages of open issues. Now there are over 150 pages.<p>Nobody is reading the issues; nobody is accepting PRs.
I am interested - you mention Pi in a few places, and I am wondering how it mitigates the issues you've described in your article.
> My opinion on local LLMs [...] :<p>>You avoid the uncanny valley where the model appears to be intelligent before doing something stupid; the stupidity is self-evident and this helps calibrate your interactions.<p>This seems to be capturing a feeling I am finding messing with local LLMs: popular software around this seems to be slop coded by no talent hacks. It's a common experience to see a python process pegged at 100% CPU with a huge amount of memory allocated, seemingly doing something that could be a simple shell script. That is before stuff reaches the LLM.<p>If that runs on somebody else's machine, you don't notice. When you see it in top it's frustrating.
I really hope truly open models and local inference are the future.<p>But are there are any reasons a pragmatic and informed developer would use OpenCode vs Claude/Codex as a harness today?<p>I'm not seeing anything competitive in terms of cost/quality/trust?
I have an MBP M4 Max 128 GB and have encountered these very limitations, though many are averted by using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. I'm also not sure there's a magical harness out there that obviates these limitations.
Finally good seeing someone else also getting frustrated with OpenCode and posting the issues.
It's not a great UI, but for messing with ideas in a VM, the free tier is very hard to beat, otherwise I'd be on Claude Code, but still on a VM, because I won't let them near anything I actually care about.
This is why I use the reasonix or whale harness for Deepseek, prefer the hyper optimized cache hits making request converge on almost free.
There are a number of points I completely agree with in this blog post. Security implications, handing out all your data to anthropic/openai/google, allowing a slop machine to execute arbitrary code on your machine and having full access to your network is something that would have made anyone working in security commit a ritual suicide just thinking about it as recent as 2022-2023. And I am baffled by the fact that we all sign tons of NDA's as part of our employment contracts, just to throw all out the window by giving it all away to anthropic/openai/google etc, at what is effectively a symbolic fee. We all know it costs a lot more than 100 bucks a month or whatever it is they charge.<p>That said, I firmly believe that if AI is to survive, the future HAS TO BE local or near-local. Having said that, statements such as<p>> Docker causes security holes:<p>> It creates a god-service that runs as root.<p>> It deliberately punches a hole in ufw firewalls.<p>Sorry, none of those are correct IF you know what you are doing. Though I will admit, seeing people that know what they are doing is increasingly uncommon.<p>Also there is nothing wrong with developing inside containers. If anything, that is arguably one of the biggest selling points for containers - environment(s) you can crash infinitely at no cost.<p>I still dislike opencode for a bunch of reasons - the assumption that llms are immune to screw ups, being one. As for the default behavior - using cloud by default - I didn't know that(I do not use any AI for direct coding tasks) and if that is the case, yeah, this is bad. Undeniably a horrible decision.
Yeah, this is one of the weaker parts of the post because I didn't really make my position clear: that sandboxing should be a first-class integral part of every harness, not an afterthought that risks putting something you care about on the same side of the trust boundary as the LLM.<p>Some of my own frustrations with bad Docker deployments leaked through. I did snip some of them out way back when I posted this, but maybe not enough.
> that sandboxing should be a first-class integral part of every harness,<p>Essentially, what you want is that the people who produce harnesses like OpenCode to also implement proper sandboxing and security. Why... why do you believe they'll do <i>anything</i> remotely satisfactory?<p>It's been empirically demonstrated, again and again, that at least 85% of software developers (and this is a very generous estimation) can not be trusted to bother about the security, so leaving the implementation of the security mechanisms and policies up to them simply doesn't work in practice. It just doesn't.
Any recommendations for non-typescript-based coding TUI harnesses/agents other than Codex? Given that Codex is open source someone should've built an untethered client?
I just did the obvious thing and asked an AI to plan / consider and implement improvements / changes in the code based on the article.
On the upside, Opencode has finally nudged me to learn sandboxing via bwrap in Linux and sandbox-exec on Mac.
posted just as I start to use OpenCode haha
Pi, especially bundled as OhMyPi, performs significantly better than anything else.
My bet:<p>In a years time the discussions on using CC, Opencode, Pidev etc. will be redundant as we will be building our own tooling with whatever programming language and tooling you want.<p>Some will repurpose a popular opensource tool or harness, others will build it from scratch in an hour or so.
> "I just don’t want to use Docker for development – if your dependencies are so sprawling that you’ve lost track of how to install them on a new machine, why do you have so many?"<p>I mean, there's a perfectly good solution for many of the security issues mentioned in the article... But it is dismissed because the author just doesn't "want to"?<p>By the way, LXC is probably better suited for reproducible build/development environments, over Docker.
There are definitely annoyances with OpenCode.<p>The remote-preferred attitude caught me once. Also, its server APIs don't match its docs, if you want to talk to it programatically.<p>The following config works for me to keep it on a local model:<p>{
"$schema": "<a href="https://opencode.ai/config.json">https://opencode.ai/config.json</a>",
"provider": {
"local-llama": {
"npm": "@ai-sdk/openai-compatible",
"name": "Local llama.cpp Server",
"options": {
"baseURL": "http://localhost:8080/v1"
},
"models": {
"Chefs Choice": {
"name": "ANY"
}
}
},
...<p>This allows me to put any model I want on port 8080.
Use Picode as an alternative to Opencode
This is a time when I don’t want HN to rewrite an article’s title.<p>I understand why the mods do it, but I don’t appreciate it. It’s your space, but it’s not your article.
Don't use Opencode, Don't use remote models (cloud providers), Don't use Docker to isolate coding agents.<p>May as well write a post saying don't use LLM's for any SWE work.<p>>Conclusion
Stop using OpenCode.<p>>Post-script: Local LLMs
This is worth its own post – I have multiple attempts in my blog drafts – but it needs to be addressed briefly here. My opinion on local LLMs like Qwen3.6-27B is they are corrosive to the stability and conceptual fidelity of your codebase in the same way as frontier models, with the following three differences:<p>>You avoid the uncanny valley where the model appears to be intelligent before doing something stupid; the stupidity is self-evident and this helps calibrate your interactions.<p>>The weight count is too low to reproduce the training set verbatim, which nudges the calculus on whether the output should be considered tainted. This is distinct from larger models which can reproduce inputs verbatim, but are trained to refuse to.<p>>You avoid supporting or relying upon cloud providers.<p>>I’ve had useful results from input-oriented tasks like: “I think there is a bug in code x with symptoms y, my guess on the mechanism is z. Read all relevant code, come back with a call chain and code citations.” Framing it as a search problem reins in the clanker’s propensity to make shit up.<p>>Using LLMs for code generation feels like a dead end. However thoroughly you think you understand your architecture, your planning is constantly undone by shortcuts like “what if I just move this mutable state into the middle of the design so everyone can share it?” This is hostile to your ability to understand your code, beyond the fact that you didn’t write it.<p>>Drawing answers directly from knowledge in model weights leads to hallucination even for multi-trillion-parameter models, so why bother making them that big? If people were realistic about limitations then we wouldn’t be building new power stations for datacenters, and they wouldn’t be rammed into every product.<p>>The entire software ecosystem around LLMs is completely rotten, and if they do ever become “just a tool” then some actual systems engineering needs to be done around them to turn them into tools instead of security black holes. That work will have to be done by humans.
> > Don't use Opencode, Don't use remote models (cloud providers), Don't use Docker to isolate coding agents.<p>> May as well write a post saying don't use LLM's for any SWE work.<p>Alternatives exist
I have moved to kilo code for now
Opencode's cache hit rate is better than claude code. Opencode has in my experience been better than any of the closed source / closed development alternatives and is not locked down.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883275">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883275</a>
> It globs your filesystem and re-reads AGENTS.md (injected in turn-0 system prompt) on every SSE turn. If you put a quick note in AGENTS.md to be read in the next session, you immediately force a full re-evaluation.<p>Um. Which then gets immediately cached again.<p>I prefer this behavior. I prefer my changes incorporated immediately, rather than wait for the next session. Call me crazy.<p>(Author is unhinged and this story is upvoted because #AI-HATE.)
I also would want anything that I saved into AGENTS.md to be incorporated right after I saved it.<p>I might accept if my newly saved information was overlooked, but it's hard for me to fathom how I'd demand "I want to save this information in AGENTS.md now, but I don't want you to look at it until the next time I launch you..." and call any behavior other than that annoying or alarming.
Also, aren't instructions earlier in the prompt treated with more weight than those that occur much later? Sure, you could insert the system prompt later to avoid re-caching as much, but then the system prompt (if I am understanding correctly) carries MUCH less weight.<p>(And also your point about immediately being re-cached a good one)
It’s a shame they have such a dominant position in terms of harnesses. There are many much better alternatives that deserve attention. Especially since one of their main devs is such an asshole online.
OpenCode is indeed bad, but it's the least bad agent out there :(<p>Plugin opencode-slim-system can be used to override the system prompt and the tool description for any tool (including bash). It helps a lot to fix their nonsense.<p>magic-context plugin fixes the compaction issues.<p>Run the entire process in landstrip for sandboxing to alleviate any bash concerns.
I'm glad that when I recommended opencode to a friend, I taught them first to install a vm and create an app specific user to boot.<p>Many users did things right the first couple of days and then turned the security off after seeing it 'work fine' on its own.<p>Was a cool thing to use for a couple of weeks in v1, you have to be quite static to keep using it at v68 of self vibecoding while the llm providers like openai already developed their in house alternative.
Weird this is currently #1 on the front page.
You should <i>absolutely</i> be running your AI agent inside _some_ kind of sandbox. I put together a list of 19 mostly open-source ones here: <a href="https://pleasedonotescape.com/" rel="nofollow">https://pleasedonotescape.com/</a> along with a list of non-project-solutions
`greywall -- opencode`
Yeah, I don't think that line quite landed. My point was that LLMs are inherently adversarial (read, "relentlessly proactive") and sandboxing should be a first-class integral feature of your harness, not an afterthought. The problem with dev containers is you still tend to end up with something you care about on the same side of the trust boundary as the LLM.
> LLMs are inherently adversarial (read, "relentlessly proactive") [and] you still tend to end up with something you care about on the same side of the trust boundary as the LLM<p>I mean this is a problem with many coworkers too, so you deal with it in the same way: limit what they can do to creating pull requests.
I was taking this semi-seriously until I read his CLI complaints.<p>Author is unhinged.
With posts like this there's usually priors involved, it's crazy vitriolic.
Cache misses are the one reason I stopped using OpenCode in favor of Pi. OpenCode mutates the system prompt every turn, which is completely unacceptable and betrays such a basic misunderstanding of LLMs that I can't in good conscience trust the rest of the product regardless of how technically impressive it is.
If OpenCode is so terrible it wouldn't be the base for many of the fortune 500's internal cli coding agents, Meta included
I'm not sure that I buy into the premise that everything Meta does is OK
> If OpenCode is so terrible it wouldn't be the base<p>Ignoring the appeal to authority inherent to this kind of statement, it's ignoring another implication. Large companies can afford to maintain a fork. Using the latest release of OpenCode day to day is a different proposition than serving as some corporate developmental branch "base", as shorthand for all sorts of changes/usage.
Well, out of the agentic harnesses available, OpenCode is the most promising and capable whilst still remaining open; proprietary alternatives like Claude Code have all these problems and more. So I guess the only way out is to just not use LLMs for development at all.<p>...<p>[chadjak.png] Your terms are acceptable.
Opencode offers free models with 200/requests over 5 hours. That's why I use it. It is the only reason I care about.<p>What's the alternative there? Gemini used to have free tiers. Qwen used to. AMP used to. Ollama cloud used to. Codebuff used to... None of them have those programs anymore<p>The reason I use it is purely financial. I do not have an employer and I'm writing free software<p>Edit: pi.dev doesn't have free inference endpoints. That's the constraint.
There are other OSS agent harnesses.
You could easily just use Pi or even a Codex fork to avoid Opencode as a harness and still pay zero dollars.
Currently only Mimo has a usable free offer with their own CLI. (opencode clone)
pi.dev
The mix of humanizing the LLM, calling it "clanker" and being very aggressive towards it is really weird. I don't think it's a good habit to take, it feels like it could bleed into how you interact with people. Many interactions are through text interfaces these days.
The mouth speaks what is in the heart. What is inside eventually leaks out. In anonymized spaces, this is especially true, and has been acknowledged from the beginnings of the internet (and perhaps long before). When you don a mask, your heart speaks freely.<p>But the knife cuts both ways. As you speak, so will your heart be. I think modern psychology supports this. Actions drive attitude, and attitude drives actions. If you assert your will in either place, the other is disrupted and will adjust.<p>You can literally change yourself into whoever you want to be. But a passive participant in this process will simply show the world what kind of person they are without ever realizing it.
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About the caching things. This is a flaw in the backend, not in the Frontend. If the backend is only relying on prefix cache you need to look for more fine grained cache solutions like HiCache or Lmcache. If your backend discards the whole cache because of one date is changed, you really can’t blame it on the Frontend. It is an implementation detail that you push to the wrong side.
That's not how it works. While there are some research papers looking into using chunks of kv cache while discarding others, those involve architecture changes in the models themselves. HiCache / LMcache (used in sglang/vllm) are ways of optimising the juggling of kv cache, but IIUC it still needs to be token perfect atm.
Prefix caching is inherent in how global softmax attention works. Modifying the prefix invalidates the suffix because the suffix's cached KV projections are a function of the hidden state after the model has evaluated the prefix.<p>There have been some attempts to approximately stitch KV blocks without full re-evaluation (see: CacheBlend on arxiv), but the results aren't promising.<p>You mentioned HiCache: as far as I can tell this is a prefix tree cache that efficiently shares prefixes across related histories. If you change the <i>prefix</i>, everything after the change still misses the cache and needs to be prefilled again.