alt Hacker NewsOpenCode was the first open source agent I used, and my main workhorse after experimenting briefly with Claude Code and realizing the potential of agentic coding. Due to that, and because it's a popular an open source alternative, I want to be able to recommend it and be enthusiastic about it. The problem for me is that the development practices of the people that are working on it are suboptimal at best; they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things (or even build a proper list of changes for each release), and they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace.
More than that, it's an extremely large and complex TypeScript code base — probably larger and more complex than it needs to be — and (partly as a result) it's fairly resource inefficient (often uses 1GB of RAM or more. For a TUI).
On top of that, at least I personally find the TUI to be overbearing and a little bit buggy, and the agent to be so full of features that I don't really need — also mildly buggy — that it sort of becomes hard to use and remember how everything is supposed to work and interact.
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> The problem for me is that the development practices of the people that are working on it are suboptimal at best; they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things (or even build a proper list of changes for each release), and they add, remove, refine, change, fix, and break features constantly at that accelerated pace.
this is what i notice with openclaw as well. there have been releases where they break production features. unfortunately this is what happens when code becomes a commidity, everyone thinks that shipping fast is the moat but at the expense of suboptimality since they know a fix can be implemented quickly on the next release.
OpenCode's creator acknowledged that the ease of shipping has let them ship prototype features that probably weren't worth shipping and that they need to invest more time cleaning up and fixing things.
I'm still trying to figure out how "open" it really is; There are reports that it phones home a lot[0], and there is even a fork that claims to remove this behavior[1]:
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencod...
I recently listened to this episode from the Claude Code creator (here is the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4) and it sounded like their development process was somewhat similar - he said something like their entire codebase has 100% churn every 6 months. But I would assume they have a more professional software delivery process.
I would (incorrectly) assume that a product like this would be heavily tested via AI - why not? AI should be writing all the code, so why would the humans not invest in and require extreme levels of testing since AI is really good at that?
Probably all describe problems stem from the developers using agent coding; including using TypeScript, since these tools are usually more familiar with Js/Js adjacent web development languages.
The value of having (and executing) a coherent product vision is extremely undervalued in FOSS, and IMO the difference between a successful project in the long-term and the kind of sploogeware that just snowballs with low-value features.
> they're constantly releasing at an extremely high cadence, where they don't even spend the time to test or fix things
Tbf, this seems exactly like Claude Code, they are releasing about one new version per day, sometimes even multiple per day. It’s a bit annoying constantly getting those messages saying to upgrade cc to the latest version
I’m a little surprised by your description of constant releases and instability. That matches how I would describe Claude Code, and has been one of the main reasons I tend to use OpenCode more than Claude Code.
OpenCode has been much more stable for me in the 6 months or so that I’ve been comparing the two in earnest.
Yeah every time I want to like it, scrolling is glitched vs codex and Claude. And other various things like: why is this giant model list hard coded for ollama or other local methods vs loading what I actually have...
On top of that. Open code go was a complete scam. It was not advertised as having lower quality models when I paid and glm5 was broken vs another provider, returning gibberish and very dumb on the same prompt
Drives me nuts that we have TUIs written in friggin TS now.
That being said, I do prefer OpenCode to Codex and Claude Code.
Yeah I tried using it when oh-my-opencode (now oh-my-openagent) started popping off and found it had highly unstable. I just stick with internal tooling now.
its hard not to wonder if they are taking their own medicine, but not quite properly
Isn't this pretty much the standard across projects that make heavy use of AI code generation?
Using AI to generate all your code only really makes sense if you prioritize shipping features as fast as possible over the quality, stability and efficiency of the code, because that's the only case in which the actual act of writing code is the bottleneck.
I am more concerned about their, umm, gallant approach to security. Not only that OpenCode is permissive by default in what it is allowed to do, but that it apparently tries to pull its config from the web (provider-based URL) by default [1]. There is also this open GitHub issue [2], which I find quite concerning (worst case, it's an RCE vulnerability).
[1] https://opencode.ai/docs/config/#precedence-order
[2] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10939