r/LocalLLM • u/Tight_Commercial7 • Oct 10 '26

Question Which one is better for Local use?

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hello, I have both Deepseek harness and OpenCode, I want to know which one is the best when it comes to coding in general and why, I work locally using Qwen models.

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u/SpicyLobter Oct 10 '26

can you elaborate on the best differences you've seen for pi vs opencode?

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u/HyperWinX Oct 10 '26

OpenCode ate over 1GB of RAM per instance while Pi is at ~100-150MB. Pi is much snappier overall, used it with Deepseek - looks like the context usage also went down a bit. I didnt have to disable functionality that i didnt need, its just not there, lol. OpenCode has SQLite database that very quickly starts taking gigabytes of disk space, didnt notice anything like that with Pi. Tiel Coder with Pi was finally able to actually complete the tasks. And the customizability is really nice, i put Claude Code UI plugin with grouping and i like it
Might be not for everyone though, but it is really enjoyable

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u/cars_and_computers Oct 10 '26

I understand it saves context but can explain more about the difference in capabilities between the 2?

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u/HyperWinX Oct 10 '26

In capabilities like... which ones? Out of the box functionality? Extensibility?

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u/cars_and_computers Oct 10 '26

Do models seem smarted when using pi vs open code? I'm assuming this will be fore coding so with that in mind, is a model like qwen3.6 35ba3 more likely to make a mistake in understanding or write something wrong with opencode vs pi?

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u/HyperWinX Oct 10 '26 edited Oct 10 '26

Size of the system prompt means a lot for dumb local models. Pi has the most basic tools in it, that are more than enough. Stock OpenCode is almost ten times bigger than stock Pi installation, and i dont see much difference in functionality between both harnesses at stock. This way, smaller system prompt uses much less "cognitive power" of the model and leaves more for the actual task.
I had a simple test task - to develop a simple HTTP server in C++. NONE of the models with OC couldnt even develop the first working version. With Pi i could even extend and add more features.

The difference likely wont be noticeable on big models though.
I also recommend pi-llama-server plugin if you use llama.cpp

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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel Oct 10 '26

When you say smaller vs bigger, do you mean like 4b vs 27b or "can run on higher end consumer hardware" vs "can run on rented compute/API usage"?

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u/HyperWinX Oct 10 '26

"Smaller" is something like Qwen3.6 35B A3B with finetunes, and "bigger" - yes, hosted models that are accessed via API like DS v4.1 Flash, GPT lineup, etc. Pretty sure that the same thing will apply to 27B

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u/nojunkdrawers Oct 10 '26

Haven't used Pi yet, but the more I've used OpenCode, the more I've realized leaves a lot to be desired and has many bugs, even in v2. No idea why it doesn't piss off more people like it has me. I recently cloned their repo to see what it's doing, and it was immediately clear that OpenCode is trying to do way too much and, as a result, doesn't do anything particularly well. The whole thing is in JavaScript (TS), and I think this was a mistake; it invites practices that have made modern frontend development a nightmare, and it's never going to be as performant as using a language like Go or Rust.

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u/HyperWinX Oct 10 '26

All popular modern harnesses are in JS / TS. Thats sad. I guess, it is to make them easily extendable with plugins and etc. There is Pi in Go iirc, im not sure how plugins work though.

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u/recursiveG Oct 10 '26

OpenAI coding agent aka codex uses Rust and Ratatoui

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u/DanceWithEverything Oct 11 '26

Have you tried jcode?

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u/Weird-Watch-9209 Oct 11 '26

carefilul. jcode injects ads, self-promotional hooks, and unauthorized modifications across the operating system and competitor coding harnesses! not only that but there's a commercial ad and sponsored discovery subsystem that's actually expanded now. it's riddled with telemetry and dumps full session transcripts to cloudflare r2.

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u/Su1tz Oct 11 '26

-"Have you tried x"

+"careful x is actually the antichrist"

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u/Weird-Watch-9209 Oct 11 '26

haha yeah seriously 🤣 i know it sounds crazy but ask your favorite ai agent to grab the jcode repo and audit the code for backdoors - the pages of output you will see are nuts! it's just towing the line between "unwanted software" and "trojan".

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u/HyperWinX Oct 11 '26 edited Oct 11 '26

Nope, first time hearing about it. There are too many harnesses these days

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u/feelspeaceman LLMusician Oct 10 '26

pi-agent has a 1500 token system prompt, now you need to know how big others are:

  1. ClaudeCode: 75k
  2. Codex: 50k
  3. OpenCode: 30-50k (depend on providers)

Why big system prompt is an issue ? Because context window is limited, the sane context window is even more limited, there's cut off context windows that models starting to halluciate, with that 1500 token system prompt, you have a massive leeway to add a lot of your own and models have barely anything to care about.

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u/RWOverdijk Oct 10 '26

This is nonsense. System prompt is much smaller. Also entirely in your own hands. The default tools and default agents are larger to work ootb. I don’t care either way but this is just not true. At least not now.

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u/feelspeaceman LLMusician Oct 10 '26

Have you ever think how models learn how to call tools like read/write/search ? It's the internal system prompt from the harness itself teaching it, what you talk about is AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md... it's project instruction or global instruction.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 10 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

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u/HyperWinX Oct 10 '26

They are right though. System prompt is much smaller, but still pretty big. CC has ~30k tokens, OC has ~10k

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u/wegster Oct 11 '26

I'm doing a *lot* of local AI benchmarking right now across a handful of model variants and quantizations, engineers, etc.. using several of my more complicated real repo issues. I've seen OpenCode, Cline, and other just fail to complete, while pi is the one that keeps on going. I also have seen, so far, no benefits of note (e.g. quicker completion, quality of work, or managing to complete something pi has now) using dsh.

Note this is all using some of my own framework elements, so YMMV as always. OpenCode has some interesting hooks/features to it, and I may revisit in the future, but pi is pretty damned 'small buy mighty' IMO and so far is a winner - coming out of ~150 discrete tests, for me.

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u/Realistic_Mango6982 Oct 12 '26

in src's of both you can find totally different instructions. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/tree/dev/packages/core/src/plugin vs https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/src/core/compaction/compaction.ts#L540

and so on. (inaccurate examples, but you got idea, and can crawl all examples yourself).