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Comment by cromka | Hacker News Reader

Is pi better than opencode?

I haven't tried opencode, but when I opened pi I was able to complain about that silly and stupid left-padding that LLM TUIs have started using that prevents basic copy-paste operation, and pi was able to edit itself to fix it.

So I'm sold on that level alone. Good stuff.

They are different models. OpenCode is trying to be a claude code/codex replacement, where-as pi is something you build yourself, kind of trying to be an emacs type thing compared to vs-code. As in emacs it is more common to write your own extensions, where as in vs-code most people just download them.

I keep butting into the question of; why opencode, when you've got codex available? Codex is open source as well, and i can't seem to picture a situation where one would want Opencode over Codex.

As far as I can tell, they tick the same boxes- but one has the support of a big boy model provider.

If you care about privacy at all, you can route your Opencode requests through an inference provider that does not retain any logs or data. It is also much cheaper. So if your boxes include `Privacy` and `Affordability`, then no, they don't tick the same boxes.

I think they meant using Codex with non-openai providers?

You can use the Codex harness with non-openai providers if you want.

Pretty sure you need to use an older version of Codex for this to work.

Not very well, if you're using the latest version of Codex. They broke a lot of stuff that made that possible.

Well, the reason is simple: over the past several months, it has become very difficult to use Codex with non-OpenAI models. They removed the old edit tool that didn't require OpenAI's free form tool calling (that no other LLM host supports), they are adding tools to every request of a type that break most LLM hosts unless you use a proxy to filter them out, they add a "developer" role to some messages which breaks some chat templates, etc.

If someone wanted to fork Codex and make a community-maintained version that supports third party models, that would be great, because I liked Codex better than OpenCode for the most part.

Maybe you've found workarounds. Maybe you're using an old version of Codex. Maybe you have your own soft fork. I don't know. But I used to be able to use Codex with self-hosted models, and I gave up on that about a month ago as they kept breaking that.

Ah, I wasn't aware things regressed there. Yea certainly workarounds n soft fork sorts of things definitely would work- but thats a bummer than things have changed.

From watching Pr's and issues- seems like openai at least wants to come across as if theyre supporting non-oai models :/

Yeah... one of the relevant issues: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/11940#issuecomment-45...

You would think they would support their own GPT-OSS model, but, not really anymore. I wish they would release a GPT-OSS 2, but this doesn't fill me with confidence.

oh-my-pi is a bit of a cross between the two; comes with basically everything OpenCode does, but still easy to customise.

OpenCode is nice if you don't want to do a lot of research and just want to get started right away. The OpenCode Go plan for $5 a month for your first month is a great way to do this, with good models to choose from and reasonable usage limits for a beginner.

I use Go plan precisely with Opencode IDE (and also Jetbrains IDE suite), but now also have access Gemini Pro and Claude Pro. And wonder which tooling to invest my time into, especially that MCP servers also potentially come into play here, and I want at least some models/tools to handle private tasks, like handling my increasingly-complex Home Assistant setup. And I also want to start using models according to needs (plan, execution, reviews). This shit gets extremely complicated extremely quickly, not to mention how often this field shifts direction.

I use “all of them”. My primary harness is oh-my-pi. I probably use 10 different models on a regular basis.

I occasionally use OpenCode.

I try to use Codex and Antigravity as much as I can, often using it as a secondary agent (due to different usage pricing models than API). The same skills and MCPs work across harnesses.

Edit: I don’t use Claude Code simply because I already have enough to deal with and don’t see a major advantage to their harness. I use Opus credits from my Google subscription on the rare occasion I need them.

Cursor is also worth checking out particularly at the $20 a month price tier. If you have Grok you effectively already have it too.

I expect to have a completely different answer a year from now. The main “lift” we’ve gotten from AI tools is our clients now get an Android + iOS app + macOS app + Electron + PWA to go with whatever web based app they want us to build, at essentially the same original price. (There’s also a CLI and a TUI, but so far none of them care about that…)

We just made the decision to start adding MCPs to apps. Gonna be an interesting conversation in a few weeks when I can tell my business contact he can use his favourite chatbot to now plug in directly to the custom app he bought from me.

Nice, thanks for the write-up!

Ive tried both, and pi's core is a lot smaller but can be extended to have as many features as opencode. personally I like using pi with llama.cpp, and use stuff like pi.dev/packages/pi-llama-cpp-stats to combine them better. there's a lot of stuff you'll feel like pi is missing, but its just optional.

I like it.

One caveat is that it doesn't do MCP tools, but can wire them up with bash (or use CLIs if those are available).

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