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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

By default OpenCode sends all of your prompts to Grok's free tier to come up with chat summaries for the UI.

To change that, you need to set a custom "small model" in the settings.

This is my main problem I have with it: It sends data and loads code left and right by default. For instance, the latest plugin packages are automatically installed on every startup. Their “Zen” provider is enabled by default so you might accidentally upload your code base to their servers. Better yet: The web UI has a button that just uploads the entire session to their servers WITH A SINGLE CLICK for sharing.

The situation is ... pretty bad. But I don’t think this is particularly malicious or even a really well considered stance, but just a compromise in order to move fast and ship useful features.

To make it easily adoptable by anyone privacy conscious without hours of tweaking, there should be an effort to massively improve this situation. Luckily, unlike Claude Code, the project is open source and can he changed!

There is some kind of fitting irony around agentic coding harnesses mainly being maintained by coding agents themselves, and as a result they are all a chaotic mess.

I had to double check this. Here is summary:

The model selection for title generation works as follows (prompt.ts:1956-1960): 1. If the title agent has an explicit model configured — that model is used. 2. Otherwise, it tries Provider.getSmallModel(providerID) — which picks a "small" model from the same provider as the current session, using this priority list (provider.ts:1396-1402): - claude-haiku-4-5 / claude-haiku-4.5 / 3-5-haiku / 3.5-haiku - gemini-3-flash / gemini-2.5-flash - gpt-5-nano - (Copilot adds gpt-5-mini at the front; opencode provider uses only gpt-5-nano) 3. If no small model is found — it falls back to the same model currently being used for the session. So by default, title generation uses a cheaper/faster small model from the same provider (e.g., Haiku if on Anthropic, Flash if on Google, nano if on OpenAI), and if none are available, it just uses whatever model the user is chatting with. You can also override this entirely by configuring a model on the title agent.

When I did this, I used a single local llama.cpp server instance as my main model without setting a small model and it did not use it for chat titles while I used it for prompts.

Chat titles would work even when the local llama.cpp server hadn't started, and it was never in the the llama.cpp logs, it used an external model I hadn't set up and had not intended to use.

It was only when I set `small_model` that I was able to route title generation to my own models.

Maybe it was for older version?

Fwiw this got changed about a week ago, where they changed the logic to match the documentation rather than default to sending your prompts to their servers. This is why so many people have noticed this happening but if you ask an AI about it right now it will say this is not true.

Personally I think it's necessary to run opencode itself inside a sandbox, and if you do that you can see all of the rejected network calls it's trying to make even in local mode. I use srt and it was pretty straightforward to set up

Also, even when using local models in ollama or lmstudio, prompts are proxied via their domain, so never put anything sensitive even when using local setup

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencod...

They also don't let you run all local models, but specific whitelisted by another 3rd party: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/4232

To be clear, that seems to be about the webui only, the TUI doesn't seem affected. I haven't fully investigated this myself, but when I run opencode (1.2.27-a6ef9e9-dirty) + mitmproxy and using LM Studio as the backend, when starting opencode + executing a prompt, I only see two requests, both to my LM Studio instance, both normal inference requests (one for the chat itself + one for generating the title).

Everything you read on the internet seems exaggerated today. Especially true for reddit, and especially especially true for r/LocalLllama which is a former shadow of itself. Today it's mostly sockpuppets pushing various tools and models, and other sockpuppets trying to push misinformation about their competitors tools/models.

Geez there should be a big warning on the tin about this. They’re so neatly integrated with copilot that I assumed (and told others) that they had all the privacy guarantees of copilot :(

this isn't true

it will use whatever small model there is in your provider

we had a fallback where we provided free small models if your provider did not have one (gpt nano)

some configs fell back to this unexpectedly which upset people so we removed it

I can tell that you’re doing all of this in the name of first-use UX. It’s working: The out of the box experience is really seamless.

But for serious (“grown up”) use, stuff like this just doesn’t fly. At all. We have to know and be able to control exactly where data gets sent. You can’t just exfiltrate our data to random unvetted endpoints.

Given the hurt trust of the past, there also needs to be a communication campaign (“actually we’re secure now”), because otherwise people will keep going around claiming that OpenCode sends all of your data to Grok. This would really unnecessarily hurt the project in the long run.

Yikes... sending prompts to a third party by default with no disclosure in the setup flow is a rough look for a tool that positions itself as the open sources alternative. "Open" loses meaning fast if the defaults work against the user.

Seems like an anti-pattern to me to run AI models without user’s consent.

? The whole idea of a coding assistant is to send all your interactions with the program to the llm model.

To the provider you select in the UI, I agree. But OpenCode automatically sends prompts to their free "Zen" proxy, even without choosing it in the UI.

Imagine someone using it at work, where they are only allowed to use a GitHub Copilot Business subscription (which is supported in OpenCode). Now they have sent proprietary code to a third party, and don't even know they're doing it.

This is exactly me considering what I might have leaked to god knows who via grok. I was hyped by opencode but now I’m thinking of alternatives. A huge red flag… at best irresponsible?

Not true according to a CGPT question:

More importantly, the current dev branch source for packages/opencode/src/session/summary.ts shows summarizeMessage() now only computes diffs and updates the message summary object; it does not make an LLM call there anymore. The current code path calls summarizeSession() and summarizeMessage(), and summarizeMessage() just filters messages, computes diffs, sets userMsg.summary.diffs, and saves the message.

https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/dev/packages/open...

My understanding is that it’s best to set a whitelist in enabled_providers, which prevents it from using providers you don’t anticipate.

Are you using Grok for the coding? Because I have Copilot connected and I can see the request to Copilot for the summaries - with no "small model" setting even visible in my settings.

> By default OpenCode sends all of your prompts to Grok's free tier

Just my prompts, or everything the agent has in the context window?

Also, could you please provide a reference for this claim? Thank you

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