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Comment by dvtkrlbs | Hacker News Reader

What boggles my mind is. I've been using OpenCode [1] which had this future for at least 6 months. I sometimes baffled by the slow progress of closed source software. Also highly recommend OpenCode you can also use it with your Claude subscription or Copilot one.

[1]: https://opencode.ai/

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I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get OpenCode to actually do anything useful, and not for lack of trying. Claude code gets me great results instantly, opencode (if I can't make it talk to a model, which isn't easy for Gemini) gets me… something, but it's nowhere near as useful as claude code. I don't know why there is so much difference, because theoretically there shouldn't be. Is it the prompt that Anthropic has been polishing in Claude code for so long?

I only played with Claude Code briefly but my experience with OpenCode was amazing. My experience it works the best with Claude especially Sonnet models (I use it with Claude Sonnet 4.5 with my Copilot subscription).

Claude models in opencode use the Claude code system prompt, are you comparing Claude code to opencode with non anthropic models?

Yes.

That's apples to oranges then. You should use the same model between both harnesses if you want to evaluate the harnesses individually.

There’s a ton of difference provided on top of the LLMs, especially the tools that allow LLMs to engineer their own context, validate generated code, test generate code, research code bases, planners, memory, skills, etc. The difference is night and day: like a brain in a closed jar versus a brain in a mobile human with eyes, ears, mouth and hands.

> Is it the prompt that Anthropic has been polishing in Claude code for so long?

I think so.

The opencode TUI is very good, but whenever I try it again the results are subjectively worse than Claude Code. They have the disadvantage of supporting many more models in terms refining prompts / tool usage.

The Claude Code secret sauce seems to be running evals on real world performance and then tweaking prompts and the models themselves to make it work better.

You can move quite fast when you don't have to spend half a week persuading 7 stakeholders that something is worth doing, then spend a week arguing about sprint capacity and roadmap disruptions.

preferring open source and provider agnostic tools, i really want to like OpenCode. i used it exclusively for months, but sadly it has major usability issues which switching to Claude Code solved:

- accidental approvals when trying to queue a prompt because of the unexpected popovers - severe performance issues when pending approval (using 100% of all cores) - tool call failures

having used Crush, OpenCode, aider, mistral-vibe, Gemini CLI (and the Qwen fork), and Claude Code, the clear winner is CC. Gemini/Qwen come in second but they do lose input when you decline a requested permission on a tool call.

that said, CC also has its issues, like the flickering problem that happens in some terminals while scrolling executed command output.

tbf, OpenCode's development cycle seems pretty fast. If someone announced AGI in the morning, I'd bet they have it integrated by EOD.

I also use OpenCode extensively, but bounce around to test out the other ones.

I just started playing with OpenCode over the weekend after working with aider and aider-ce, and I like a lot of things about it, though I miss some aider features. What other code helpers have you worked with?

The big players (Gemini, Claude Code, Codex) and then aider and opencode for open source.

I keep my setup modular/composable so I can swap pieces and keep it usable by anyone (agent, human, time traveler) depending on what the task needs. In the aughts I standardized on "keep worklogs and notes on tools and refine them into runbooks" so that has translated pretty well to agentic skills/tools. (a man page is a perfectly cromulent skill, btw.)

I do like OpenCode, but I get small bugs here and there like flickering, freezing and sometimes just crash all together.

But their configuration setup is the easiest and best out of all the other CLI tools

One answer to questions like this is that Claude Code has orders of magnitude more paying users, so it's more important to get things right and ship carefully

i'm not sure i agree with the assessment that claude code has been moving slowly... but it is cool that opencode has had this for a while. will def check it out

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