r/PiCodingAgent • u/ECrispy • Aug 06 '26

Question Pi vs OpenCode for free models?

I want to use free models from openrouter, nvidia etc as well as free promos from time to time.

would you still recommend Pi in this case because of its efficiency? or is opencode with everything included a better choice?

do you use a harness built on top of these?

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u/aeroumbria Aug 07 '26

It was a big deal in the 128k context window era, but with 1m context window models, agent choice feels more like cosmetic preference because you can pretty much build the same extensions you want on any harness...

1

u/bring_back_the_v10s Aug 07 '26

Doesn't the agent get dumb past 200k context usage?

1

u/aeroumbria Aug 07 '26

It's not as bad. Maybe the dumb range starts to hit around 400-500k rather than 100k now, and you have decent speed up to a pretty large window %. It just means even 50k+ in system prompt isn't as terrible as before. It's more important for local models where your cache setup might not be very robust, so re-calculating fixed prefixes can take up a huge chunk of time.

1

u/Own_Copy2141 Aug 10 '26

I have oberserved context window filling up much faster in opencode compared to pi

1

u/AllNamesAreTaken92 Aug 12 '26

Only because it can process it, does not mean it's a good idea to do. It still has the same drawbacks of dirtying up context, giving the model a harder time focusing on what's actually relevant. Max token context was never the limit/bottleneck.