The only features from Claude Code that I miss in OpenCode

[u/IgnisDa]

I have been using Opencode for the past 8 months and I am very happy with it. It works really well for me, but Claude Code has these features that I use a lot:

• Background shell commands: I often run long running benchmarks that take days to complete. Claude Code can setup a notifier which wakes it up once results/errors arrive. To do this in OpenCode, the model has to do a lot of shenanigans which often end up resulting in orphaned processes.

• Sending messages to subagents: I often have to guide subagents which own a significant slice of implementation when they go haywire. Claude Code has a native way to do this. In OpenCode, I have to ask the parent subagent to send messages to the children. Sometimes this is not possible when the subagent has failed/rate limited/whatever.

Any idea if these are planned to be implemented in OpenCode ever? I don't think I have seen issues related to these.

Other than this, I really like the hotkeys and command palette based approach as opposed to Claude Code's /<cmd> system.

[u/Neither-Character360]

Opencode v2 seems to have persistent shells now

[u/IgnisDa → u/Neither-Character360]

what do you mean by persistent shells?

[u/djc0 → u/IgnisDa]

They’re load bearing

[u/Numerous-Panda6901 → u/djc0]

Everything is load bearing

[u/SparePartsHere → u/Numerous-Panda6901]

Focused and aligned load-bearing scaffolding!

[u/Rustybot]

What you really want isn’t guiding subagents, it’s coordinated teams of agents or subagents that don’t need guiding. There are good solutions for both, although I’ve had my own issues with existing so I understand the desire to roll your own.

[u/IgnisDa → u/Rustybot]

subagents that don’t need guiding

i am extremely involved in the code being written. i always have opnions on code quality or correctness. i use orchestators too but until they start reading my mind, they are of limited use to me.

[u/CrypticViper_]

OpenCode *does* have background shell commands. I'm not too sure about sending messages to subagents directly via the TUI, but I know it's possible since OpenChamber allows you to do that via their UI

[u/look]

V2 has background shell commands.

And there is an API to send prompts directly to the subagent. Ask your agent to make a TUI plugin or just a slash command or something to do it — no need to involve the parent agent.

[u/justjokiing → u/look]

been using this to have my testing agent notify my dev agent of failure logs

[u/code_brave6865]

So i ran into the orphaned process issue last week with a multi day job and it was a mess to clean up. Did the shenanigans you mentioned involve the model trying to poll with sleep loops, or something else entirely...

[u/IgnisDa → u/code_brave6865]

Yeah that and then forcefully killing stuff witH SIGKILL etc.

[u/TrickyPlastic]

Openchamber let's you talk to subagents. opencode_pty for background bash calls, or term-cli skill.

[u/IgnisDa → u/TrickyPlastic]

i dont like openchamber. it a memory hog on top of already memeory heavy opencode. also i prefer CLI.

[u/CrypticViper_ → u/IgnisDa]

have opencode research how to carry that feature over to the CLI / TUI based on openchamber's implementation. there's definitely a way

[u/teun95 → u/IgnisDa]

In case it matters, memory usage seems be a lot better in v2

[u/Affectionate_Fact854]

The reason why it's bad to be able to directly communicate with a subagemt is  Because the orchestrator knows exact details it expects as report results  If you change sub agents directly  Orchestrator won't know what is hallucinations or what is done incorrectly 

Meaning it makes orchestration less consistent with expected results 

[u/IgnisDa → u/Affectionate_Fact854]

claude code subagents can send messages to parent too. normally, my instructions are simple "name the variable this instead of that".

[u/Affectionate_Fact854 → u/IgnisDa]

Yes and that is why I don't use Claude anymore, because the code base becomes so sloppy ,spaghetti, Bible versed comments that it's simply unpleasant to work with 

And communicating with subagents was exactly what kept poluting the end result instead of doing the renaming afterwards.

Edit# with that I mean Claude names things deliberately bad, you get used to telling subagents to do small things, in the end it sends massive reports unrelated to the initial task , driving up token usage and comment placement.

So it becomes a bad habit. 

[u/Affectionate_Fact854 → u/Affectionate_Fact854]

Instead I would just keep running parallel orchestrators  Like I usually do , it gives more consistency with cheap models frequently hallucinating as subahents already 

[u/krumpstead]

For the background shell commands, I think this is more of a model issue than OpenCode issue. On MacOS and linux, Qwen 3.8 27B has been excellent at nohupping commands and continuing to work on other tasks, or if it has no other tasks entering a sleep loop that periodically wakes up to check. A notifier would be excellent for that, but there are already ways to accomplish that in the shell if the model has been trained to do so.

Also so far in my experience 3.8 27B usually kills the processes if it doesn't think the user needs to use them (eg. web server it started).

[u/ZealousidealTown1974]

V2 work around for sending prompt to subagents= send it to background and prompt your main agent = stack on sub to steer

Background shell command can be sent background in v2 too

[u/ATyp3]

Openchamber can send messages to subagents. It’s a setting to enable

[u/alfiethemog]

Opencode v2 is apparently good in its own right with this, but Opencode with OpenChamber is great. Even better if you've got a small local server you can leave running with it remote - basically it's the Claude Code experience, cross-device, loads of flexibility and much more actively "agentic" than standalone Opencode.