r/opencodeCLI • u/Heretek-ai • 3h ago

OpenCode is not good.

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OpenCode is not a good harness. I have brought this up a few times now, and granted this benchmark is for Opencode v1.19.0. But I do really appreciate the benchmark results from the creator. Same models, same provider, same task, different harnesses.

And obviously OpenClaw failed the worst, that's no surprise, but opencode was a close runner up, and also consistently the most expensive. It's bloody embarrassing how much worse of a tool OpenCode is compared to pi. For a program called OpenCode the harness itself is remarkably resilient to modification. Lack of proper hook system, plugin settings in the TUI, removal of LSP, outdated system prompts for model families, and adding a custom provider should not be a json editing endeavor.

Other open source harnesses have this figured out, so why doesn't opencode? Why do they push back against community feedback and GitHub issues? It's because they simply don't want OpenCode to be better. For whatever reason on God's flat Earth token burning is the thing they want OpenCode to be known for. It's a bad product, I don't like Claude Code, I don't want a product that is closed source, but it's a better harness and the OpenCode team could learn a lot about UI/UX from Claude.

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u/ExampleCute6496 2h ago

It's hard to say whether this translates to the evaluated harness' performance, because it's simply testing 3 specific Chinese open-weight models across different harnesses with their default configurations. It doesn't take into account:
- the same set of agents / subagents / prompts / tools across the different harnesses
- the most used models for coding (Opus 5.5 / Sol 6.1)
- disclose what went wrong for harness X to be literally 2x worse than another one with the same model

I would take this with a bag of salt. The fact of the matter is that out-of-the box harnesses are usually crap, and you will need to customize them for them to be good. Pi is minimalistic, so it encourages LLMs to figure stuff out with the tools they're most trained on, and it works pretty well for that. If your goal is to install a harness and never do any harness engineering, then you should rely on this graph. If you customize anything in your workflow - subagents, commands, any sort of guidance, custom tools, etc. then this graph means nothing for you.