LaurensBER

It seems that they lack a holistic strategy. All these decisions probably make sense in isolation but together they create a huge mess.

Given the increased pressure from open weight models (still 6 months behind but now more than good enough for most use cases) the frontier labs really have to step up their game.

Switching is as easy as typing /model in most harnesses so there's effectively zero moat.

My Reddit account is 14 years old, I've decided to stop using the website and overwrite all historical comments with a protest message.

I honestly did not enjoy it anymore, almost all subs feel political these days (and the worst kind of politics, American politics ;)), the hive mind downvotes everything that it disagrees with (irrespective of the merit or quality of the message) and you get bans for seemingly everything if the mods disagree with you (/r/UnitedKingdom for criticizing the government motability scheme, /r/Europe for "rape belittlement" for a message in which I mentioned _war crimes_ such as rape. I guess calling it a war crime isn't serious enough...).

Glad to have ditched it! It's a shame there isn't a similar community like old Reddit but I guess we'll get one at some point!

All AI companies are valued as if they'll win the AI race. Problem is, only one can win *

* That is, if a lab like Deepseek doesn't release a "good enough" model for the cost of electricity + a thin margin. Then all AI company lose and all consumers win.

I run my OpenClaw on whatever is the latest GLM model and ever since the release of GLM 5 it has been a smooth ride. The models solve whatever problem I throw at them and the code is good enough that I barely ever have to look at it (to guide the mode). The 5.3 release seems particularly strong, I asked if to audit all the scripts that the previous versions have written and it identified some issues and hard to find bugs.

At work, as an experiment, I used GPT 5.6 Luna + Deepseek 4 Flash for a week (I have an unlimited, "within reason", budget at work so normally I just use Fable and Sol) and it's been perfectly fine.

These models take a bit longer (more turns) to solve problems so they feel a bit slower but the end result is often just as good or nearly as good. Because they're so cheap you can easily run multiple sessions in parallel so it doesn't really matter that they're slower.

I've done a few experiments where I've split my terminal in 4, launched 4 clients (each with a different model, including Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol) and compared the output. For simple and medium complexity work open-weight models are incredible effective.

I can highly recommend the 10 USD/month OpenCode Go subscription. It offers pretty amazing value for the money and is a great way to experiment.

> So they literally built MORE houses than the increase in population! Yet it's somehow a "housing crisis".

You need to account for:

- Existing deficit

- The changing demographics, people are more likely to (prefer to) live alone putting more stress on the housing market

- The location

More young people are single and more old people prefer to live alone.

At the same time the housing crisis in Groningen might be less severe than in Amsterdam which is not visible in the nationwide numbers.

For a young single person in Amsterdam the situation will definitely feel like a crisis.

I'm not an UK citizen but as someone who lived in the UK for a while, my assessment would be that the issues that we're seeing in the UK (low trust in the politicians, ineffective of the government to address real issues, economic stagnation, etc) are actually not unique to the UK. We're seeing similar trends in The Netherlands, Germany and the Nordic countries.

If I had to take a guess, I would say that the western European political systems seems to work well in a homogenous population where you mostly need "alignment" (e.g between companies and labour unions) but seems seems to struggle with major reforms. Too many stakeholders, too many vetos and too many processes.

To give an concrete example. The Netherlands has a severe housing crisis. Despite being a relatively rich country it's not uncommon for people (sometimes even couples) to live with their parents untill they're well in their 30ies.

Yet a single guy was able to block the building of almost a hundred houses on the chance that there might be some rare(?) frogs living at the building site. While I'm all for nature conservation, surely the needs of a hundred families should go above the concerns of some hypothetical frogs.

Everyone agrees that this is crazy, seemingly very little changes.

Pricing: 120/200 USD per month, per employee.

This is an interesting idea although I'm not sure how many companies are comfortable with giving SpaceXAI access to all your files and data. Outside of America this is, most likely, not going to fly.

Sure! It's https://omp.sh/ with the advisor mode enabled.

You can probably implement something similar as a plugin for your preferred harness. From a technical perspective I think it just sends the output w/h the thinking and tool trace to another model and asks it to double check everything (exact prompt must be somewhere in the OMP repo).

5 USD is at the "raw" API price.

OpenCode currently offers 60 USD API credits at 10 USD per month (OpenCode Go) and have even doubled it temporarily as a promotion.

Effectively you can get Deepseek for 1/12th the already ridiculous cheap API price.

We have an extensive description of _how_ tests should be written and they're reviewed by a human. All the AI does is fill in the boring middle part.

I've enjoyed using https://omp.sh/

[Feat][Core] Add disk offloading support to SimpleCPUOffloadConnector — #49644 https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/49644

This adds disk as a tier in the HBM → CPU → Disk KV cache hierarchy.

There's also a cluster of related KV-offload FS PRs: #49225 (read/write batching, still open) and #49152 (batch store/load in C, merged Jul 28).

It's hard to say if these are similar to the approach DeepSeek takes but they definitely seem very interesting.

There's more to inference than just the input/output token cost. Caching has a massive impact.

Deepseek charges $0.0028 per cache read on Openrouter. The next cheapest is $0.018.

That's a massive difference and quickly adds up on coding sessions (which often hit 95%+ cached tokens).

Dax (from Opencode) has tweeted that they can replicate or beat the price with rented GPUs. Deepseeks secret sauce is the incredibly cheap caching (magnitude cheaper than other providers).

vLLM has recently released a similar approach. It's not as effective as what DeepSeek does but still an interesting development.

I have no doubt that in due time other providers will match or perhaps even beat the current DeepSeek prices.

I've been using it extensively since the release and the best summary I can give is that it's good enough to use it for (almost) everything and cheap enough that the cost are irrelevant. I'm running it in Oh My Pi with a second instance running as "advisor" and even with 5-6 active sessions (effectively 12 streams) I'm struggling to spend more than 5 bucks per day.

OpenCode Go even has double limits temporarily so for 10 USD you effectively get 140 USD of tokens to spend. It would impress me if someone could burn that amount with "normal" usage. Even when running multiple sessions.

I have a Claude Max subscription but I've barely touched it, it just feels like a step back to have to think about limits and usage even though the models are stronger.

The beauty of intelligence at this cost (even if it's not SOTA) is that it opens a whole bunch of new use cases. Test failure in CI? Have the bot automatically propose a fix, its cheap enough that you can discard it w/h issues. Test coverage too low? Auto generate tests on CI for every pull-requests! Monitoring server logs, continuous security audits and investigating every received exception now becomes possible.

I'm thinking about having it automatically filter and re-rank my social media feeds so I can steer the algorithm instead of the other way around.

Perhaps other people (with enormous budgets) were already doing all of the above but for us this is a really exciting release!

I've had great success with using Luna and having DeepSeek 4 Flash check Luna's output. Oh My Pi has a mode built-in that does this automatically ("advisor" mode). Deepseek only interrupts when it spots an issue so it doesn't slow Luna down.

Both models are cheap enough that I can run 4 sessions at the same time without running out of the 20 USD codex and 10 USD Opencode plan. I've burned through almost a billion tokens this week and I've done some pretty big refactors as well.

I have a Claude Max subscription but I've barely been using it because of the many issues they've had this week.

> they all blocked each other in the purity battle

I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read before talking to me") is scary and genuinely interesting. For some people it almost seems like a full-time job.

We even see it in some other, non-political, social circles (knitting famously had a purity competition/obsession a while ago).

I'm still struggling to explain why this is such a focal point for some people. Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people?

For a v2.0 this doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table or the page is not very good at communicating what makes this unique compared to Codex or Claude Work.

Either way good for Google but I do not expect this to gain a lot of traction, it has been almost months now since I've heard someone talk positively about the Google models and other AI offerings.

It's too little, too late.

OMP is great to get started with, there's a whole bunch of stuff in there but it's mostly optional and turned off by default (like the memory backend). You can always try it and create a custom Pi config with only the stuff that you find useful if it's too much.

I'm really enjoying the advisor mode (you can have a second model monitor the output of the primary model and have it "steer" the primary when it makes a mistake or goes off the rails) and the automatic fallback to a second provider if the primary one has issues (Deepseek had some issues yesterday).

I need to dive a bit into the system prompt to see how much context OMP actually adds. I think the system prompt is still 2-3k tokens but that probably depends on bells and whistles.

I'm not a tax expert but it's my understanding that Israel doesn't have an inheritance or wealth tax which is already better than a lot of European nations.

> Yeah, but the physical assets they own can’t move freely. The EU can still tax or seize assets within the EU.

This is true but effectively it would lower the value of those assets (since any future investor needs to account for the increased tax burden) which would also be negative for the EU.

> Europe’s Ultra-Rich Could Fund a Substantial Part of the EU’s Budget

> Taxes on wealth, crypto and financial trades could raise billions no single member state can collect alone.

The sad reality is that as soon as the EU introduces this, these families won't be Europe's Ultra Rich anymore. They'll soon be the UK/Swiss/Dubai/Israel/US Ultra Rich.

What the EU needs is:

- Less bureaucracy

- One capital market

- More venture capital

What the EU doesn't need is a larger budget. Is is really an issue if a family has a net worth north of 100 million if 90% of that is invested (directly or indirectly) in future growth of the EU?

> A financial transaction tax would not only generate additional revenue for the EU budget; it would also make short-term and speculative trading in financial markets more expensive.

This goes *directly* against the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis. Potentially creating more friction and less efficient capital allocation in an continent already struggling with growth and innovation.

> A tax on ultra-high wealth would have particularly high revenue potential. One possible approach would be a minimum tax for individuals with net wealth exceeding €100 million, ensuring that the taxes paid annually by this group amount to at least a specified proportion of their wealth. Such a tax would specifically target individuals whose effective tax burden is lower than that of other groups. At the same time, it could help to limit tax competition between member states for particularly wealthy residents.

The biggest competition does not from member states, rather it comes from Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Two countries where citizenship is (for most ultra-rich) a plane ride and a few administrative meetings away. USA, the middle-east and Israel offer other options, slightly further away.

Thanks, I stand corrected! That makes all the recent changes even more puzling.

It would be interesting to hear if the addition of Reddit data makes LLM stronger or weaker.

Outside of some (technical)subs most of the comment seems to be of a far lower quality than what you find in books or in websites.

For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.

It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post).

The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a shame because at some point I really enjoyed participating on Reddit and it was a good source of valuable information.

to give some examples of mod abuse:

- /r/energy used to (or still does?) ban anyone in favour of nuclear power

- /r/ubisoft and /r/assasinscreed do not allow any posts criticizing the writing or characters, these are clearly run by the company

- /r/unitedkingdom is famous for shadow banning everyone who's critical of some government program (I got a ban for criticizing motability cars)

- /r/europe banned me 1 minute after submitting a chat control post that got 1.5k upvotes before it was removed

- some vaccination subs ban anyone who posted in anti-vaccination subs (irrespective of what they post)

Pricing often reflects what the vendors (expects) the customer is willing to pay. It seems that Google is still trying to find their niche in the market.

> Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now.

People overestimate what can happen in a year and underestimate what can happen in 5.

I'm betting that increased model efficiency and hardware optimisations will get us there a lot sooner. Biggest hurdle would be the memory prices though, if those do not drop back down it might take 15.

I feel that a better title for this article would be: "Some minor annoyances that, when fixed, would improve OpenCode"

# Prompt Cache Misses

> It globs your filesystem and re-reads AGENTS.md (injected in turn-0 system prompt) on every SSE turn. If you put a quick note in AGENTS.md to be read in the next session, you immediately force a full re-evaluation.

> Personal favourite: it puts the current date in the turn-0 system prompt and re-evaluates every SSE turn. If you’re using OpenCode at midnight you get a full prompt cache miss.

Okay, I can live with those.

# Compaction

> Want to sit for 10 minutes while the LLM server prefills the entire session with a new prompt prefixed to it, just to turn it into 5 bullet points that go at the top of a new session? Me neither. I get what they are going for, but I’ve not seen it work well. Neither compaction nor pruning is implemented well, and they interact poorly.

Is this an OpenCode specific issue? I've seen the same with Codex and Claude

# System Prompts

> The default system prompt is opinionated (fine) but it has shit opinions (not fine). It took me a while to figure out why my agent kept saying “Use ABSOLUTELY NO COMMENTS” when dispatching subagents.

Okay, so change it? Any LLM is opinionated, this system prompt enforces consistency across different models which seems reasonable.

> With a massive 2.4T parameters, this model is continuously evolving. We believe it’s one of the most powerful model available today, compatible to leading frontier AI models , second only to Fable 5.

That's a massive model!

The shift from "value" models to "intelligent, huge and slow" models coming from China is an interesting change in strategy.

My main issue with GLM 5.2 and Kimi 3 is that they're extremely token hungry and thus feel slow(er) to use.

As much as I like GLM 5.2 it's clearly a step below Opus (or even Fable) for more complicated tasks. I would place it at Opus 4.6/4.7 level.

Having said that, the safety system on Fable makes it an extremely unattractive model. It feels that half of the time you're paying double for Opus level performance.