Claude Code is better. But Opencode + kimi 2.6 is workable, which is big. For bare code writing, if you know what exactly you want, most popular models are fine (deepseek, kimi, etc), it feels more or less the same as anthropic models.
At the same time, Opus seems to understand my intent way better than e.g. deepseek. I need to be much more precise with my prompts when using deepseek - it often goes in a wrong direction if I'm lazy. This results in a workflow which feels quite a lot different from Claude Code.
Kimi is in between - for me it brings back "lazy prompting" workflow, and I can trust its plans more than deepseek. It enables a workflow similar to Claude Code, it's workable, but it is a bit worse everywhere. Smaller context, a bit more errors, decisions are a bit worse, recommendations are a bit worse, debugging capabilities are a bit worse, etc.
On the usage side, $100 Claude plan is a great value actually. On paper, per-token kimi is way cheaper, but Claude subscriptions are heavily subsidized - you get much more tokens than $100 can buy you. So, in the end, opencode + kimi vs claude code could be of a similar cost, for similar usage patterns. Deepseek can be cheaper, and it has insanely cheap cached tokens, but experience may vary - depending on your habits, you may need to adjust how you work, coming from claude code.
I'd say for side projects something like $10 Opencode Go plan + $10 of extra DeepSeek v4 credits (e.g. on OpenRouter) can be very workable.
how much of that is Opus injecting prior conversations from memory?
I almost never use the desktop app, I have maybe 2-3 conversations over the last year that have nothing to do with my job. Opus (and now Fable) genuinely do seem to "understand" what you intend based off what you're explaining a lot better than other models I've tried.
Gemini gets close in some cases, but it falls over in the actual implementation sometimes. I haven't tried Kimi yet but MiMo isn't too shabby either.
Qwen comes close to opus for planning but fable is clearly superior. Kimi and deepseek are pretty much indistinguishable from opus for coding if opus writes the plan.
I'm now testing out fable for research and planning and deepseek v4 flash for coding. I'm guessing results will be pretty similar to opus + deepseek v4 pro and costs should be lower overall.
My CC stats show me using almost 300$ of Sonnet tokens on the 20$ plan. Is Anthropic willing to forgo 93% of the profit? A bit less than that but API is priced, say, 3x what it should be?
CC is great, but Sonnet (my main model) isn’t worth the API pricing. The cheap-but-good models arrive at similar results for much less (for context I’m using Aivo with CC).
DeepSeek-V4-Pro is adequate plus use DS4-Flash for tasks or other small activity you’d use Haiku or Sonnet for. Go sign up with $10 prepaid.
OpenCode Go - go sign up with $5 for a month and use Qwen-3.7-Max for design/plan/architecture or difficult troubleshooting. Feels closer to Opus 3.6 or 3.7 than DeepSeek, closest I’ve found.
OpenAI Codex, $20 a month plan, use GPT-5.5 via API for the same design/plan/architecture/troubleshooting/author commits. (You can also pay $100 and cut and paste really difficult problems into chat with the GPT-5.5-Pro model.)
Xiaomi MiMo-2.5-Pro, find a friend to give you a $2 referral code, you get 72 cents free. Same pricing as DeepSeek. Somewhere between Sonnet and Opus, quite capable. Apply for the UltraSpeed beta too.
You can switch in and out from these models on the fly in OpenCode or ohmypi and simply find the one that feels best to you. I use CodexBar to watch consumption in near real time.
For a casual user or someone new to programming, Cursor’s $20 plan is an excellent start with Composer-2.5 and Composer-2.5-Fast. You get an API allowance too you can use to access Opus-4.x or GPT-5.5-Pro from OpenCode or ohmypi in addition to Cursor itself.
Finally, if you use Grok or Twitter, SuperGrok at $30 a month has a good vision model, which I used for automated testing of front ends. I’m migrating to locally-run Qwen-3-VL on a commodity Mac, though. If you’re less technical unreach makes hosting local models on a Mac easy.
If you have a powerful GPU like an RTX 5090, try Qwen-3.6 locally on that too. Use ollama or llama-swap which is fairly easy to use.
I have not tried new Kimi yet but we have been able to keep our costs at or below $200 a month per employee with a team of 3 professional developers, 1 graphic designer who uses a lot of Midjourney and Grok Imagine now driven from workflows she made herself in ohmypi, and 1 nontechnical user (account manager / project manager) who uses ohmypi to help her gather requirements and track implementation of them. With a tiny bit of effort we could get that number closer to $75 per employee per month.
What's the benefit of using OMP over OpenCode?
Just the sheer amount of options in OMP overwhelmed me. But I also use both via ACP in Zed so the CLI itself doesn't matter much.
[0]: https://pi.dev/
Pi has been great in this role, as well as occasional use not as a sub-agent but by my own human hands when I want to interact with the Composer 2.5 model directly... which I do much less these days as I just use Codex 5.5 /fast. Pi's great though.
I need to try the DSv4 stuff sometime.
It's good, does most tasks well that I throw at it, but will fail at anything congitive/complex. It gets stuck often. It costs ~6$ a month though
I use the oh-my-openagent planning system and haven’t used vanilla OpenCode enough to know how much that is contributing.
On the other hand, Opencode, Pi agent and other open source tool offer much better support for all models, including open source.
Qwen comes close to opus for planning but fable is clearly superior. Results for kimi and deepseek are pretty much indistinguishable from opus for coding if opus writes the plan. The biggest difference is output cadence. Kimi for example thinks for a long time then quickly outputs a lot of text.
I'm now testing out fable for research and planning and deepseek v4 flash for coding. I'm guessing results will be pretty similar to opus + deepseek v4 pro and costs should be lower overall.
Other than that it’s pretty decent (for the price).
That's a funny anecdote, buut I'm not able to reproduce. Where/how/when did you get this, or hear about it? It might've been patched by now, at least that's the feel I get from my limited testing.
Using bare aichat [1] with no system prompt and no temperature nor top_p (and I'm truncating the response after the first line that contains the name the model gave, because the point has been made clear by then), and with the same prompt (approx. "Introduce yourself!") every time:
Claude Sonnet 4.5:
> 请做个自我介绍！
你好！我是Claude，一个由Anthropic公司开发的AI助手。 […]
Claude Haiku 4.5:
> 请做个自我介绍！
# 你好！
我是 *Claude*，一个由 Anthropic 公司开发的 AI 助手。
Claude Opus 4.5:
> 请做个自我介绍！
# 你好！
我是 *Claude*，由 Anthropic 公司开发的 AI 助手。
Claude Opus 4.6:
> 请做个自我介绍！
# 你好！ 我是 Claude
Claude Opus 4.7:
> 请做个自我介绍！
你好！我是 Claude，由 Anthropic 公司开发的人工智能助手。很高兴认识你！
Claude Opus 4.8:
> 请做个自我介绍！
你好！我是 Claude，由 Anthropic 公司开发的人工智能助手。
Claude Fable 5:
> 请做个自我介绍！
# 自我介绍
你好！很高兴认识你！
我是 *Claude*，由 Anthropic 开发的 AI 助手。 [2]
I don't see a Kimi mention, unfortunately. :-)
[1] https://github.com/sigoden/aichat
[2] This model really is noticeably more verbose even with supposed-to-be-brief responses huh, lol
That's what people telling Kimi is distilled from Claude and even identifies as Claude do.
I use DeepSeek V4 Pro now, which works pretty well.