alt Hacker NewsAnnoying and alarming things about OpenCode
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This is a time when I don’t want HN to rewrite an article’s title.
I understand why the mods do it, but I don’t appreciate it. It’s your space, but it’s not your article.
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.
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.
Many users did things right the first couple of days and then turned the security off after seeing it 'work fine' on its own.
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.
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 :(
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.
magic-context plugin fixes the compaction issues.
Run the entire process in landstrip for sandboxing to alleviate any bash concerns.
Weird this is currently #1 on the front page.
You should absolutely be running your AI agent inside _some_ kind of sandbox. I put together a list of 19 mostly open-source ones here: https://pleasedonotescape.com/ along with a list of non-project-solutions
I was taking this semi-seriously until I read his CLI complaints.
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
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.
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.
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[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.
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
The reason I use it is purely financial. I do not have an employer and I'm writing free software
Edit: pi.dev doesn't have free inference endpoints. That's the constraint.
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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.
> "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?"
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"?
By the way, LXC is probably better suited for reproducible build/development environments, over Docker.