alt Hacker NewsAnnoying and alarming things about OpenCode
Comments
This is a time when I don’t want HN to rewrite an article’s title.
I understand why the mods do it, but I don’t appreciate it. It’s your space, but it’s not your article.
Don't use Opencode, Don't use remote models (cloud providers), Don't use Docker to isolate coding agents.
May as well write a post saying don't use LLM's for any SWE work.
>Conclusion Stop using OpenCode.
>Post-script: Local LLMs This is worth its own post – I have multiple attempts in my blog drafts – but it needs to be addressed briefly here. My opinion on local LLMs like Qwen3.6-27B is they are corrosive to the stability and conceptual fidelity of your codebase in the same way as frontier models, with the following three differences:
>You avoid the uncanny valley where the model appears to be intelligent before doing something stupid; the stupidity is self-evident and this helps calibrate your interactions.
>The weight count is too low to reproduce the training set verbatim, which nudges the calculus on whether the output should be considered tainted. This is distinct from larger models which can reproduce inputs verbatim, but are trained to refuse to.
>You avoid supporting or relying upon cloud providers.
>I’ve had useful results from input-oriented tasks like: “I think there is a bug in code x with symptoms y, my guess on the mechanism is z. Read all relevant code, come back with a call chain and code citations.” Framing it as a search problem reins in the clanker’s propensity to make shit up.
>Using LLMs for code generation feels like a dead end. However thoroughly you think you understand your architecture, your planning is constantly undone by shortcuts like “what if I just move this mutable state into the middle of the design so everyone can share it?” This is hostile to your ability to understand your code, beyond the fact that you didn’t write it.
>Drawing answers directly from knowledge in model weights leads to hallucination even for multi-trillion-parameter models, so why bother making them that big? If people were realistic about limitations then we wouldn’t be building new power stations for datacenters, and they wouldn’t be rammed into every product.
>The entire software ecosystem around LLMs is completely rotten, and if they do ever become “just a tool” then some actual systems engineering needs to be done around them to turn them into tools instead of security black holes. That work will have to be done by humans.
Opencode's cache hit rate is better than claude code. Opencode has in my experience been better than any of the closed source / closed development alternatives and is not locked down.
> 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.
Um. Which then gets immediately cached again.
I prefer this behavior. I prefer my changes incorporated immediately, rather than wait for the next session. Call me crazy.
(Author is unhinged and this story is upvoted because #AI-HATE.)
It’s a shame they have such a dominant position in terms of harnesses. There are many much better alternatives that deserve attention. Especially since one of their main devs is such an asshole online.
OpenCode is indeed bad, but it's the least bad agent out there :(
Plugin opencode-slim-system can be used to override the system prompt and the tool description for any tool (including bash). It helps a lot to fix their nonsense.
magic-context plugin fixes the compaction issues.
Run the entire process in landstrip for sandboxing to alleviate any bash concerns.
I'm glad that when I recommended opencode to a friend, I taught them first to install a vm and create an app specific user to boot.
Many users did things right the first couple of days and then turned the security off after seeing it 'work fine' on its own.
Was a cool thing to use for a couple of weeks in v1, you have to be quite static to keep using it at v68 of self vibecoding while the llm providers like openai already developed their in house alternative.
Weird this is currently #1 on the front page.
You should absolutely be running your AI agent inside _some_ kind of sandbox. I put together a list of 19 mostly open-source ones here: https://pleasedonotescape.com/ along with a list of non-project-solutions
I was taking this semi-seriously until I read his CLI complaints.
Author is unhinged.
With posts like this there's usually priors involved, it's crazy vitriolic.
Cache misses are the one reason I stopped using OpenCode in favor of Pi. OpenCode mutates the system prompt every turn, which is completely unacceptable and betrays such a basic misunderstanding of LLMs that I can't in good conscience trust the rest of the product regardless of how technically impressive it is.
If OpenCode is so terrible it wouldn't be the base for many of the fortune 500's internal cli coding agents, Meta included
Well, out of the agentic harnesses available, OpenCode is the most promising and capable whilst still remaining open; proprietary alternatives like Claude Code have all these problems and more. So I guess the only way out is to just not use LLMs for development at all.
...
[chadjak.png] Your terms are acceptable.
Opencode offers free models with 200/requests over 5 hours. That's why I use it. It is the only reason I care about.
What's the alternative there? Gemini used to have free tiers. Qwen used to. AMP used to. Ollama cloud used to. Codebuff used to... None of them have those programs anymore
The reason I use it is purely financial. I do not have an employer and I'm writing free software
Edit: pi.dev doesn't have free inference endpoints. That's the constraint.
The mix of humanizing the LLM, calling it "clanker" and being very aggressive towards it is really weird. I don't think it's a good habit to take, it feels like it could bleed into how you interact with people. Many interactions are through text interfaces these days.
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
About the caching things. This is a flaw in the backend, not in the Frontend. If the backend is only relying on prefix cache you need to look for more fine grained cache solutions like HiCache or Lmcache. If your backend discards the whole cache because of one date is changed, you really can’t blame it on the Frontend. It is an implementation detail that you push to the wrong side.
Use Picode as an alternative to Opencode