Opencode: First Impressions

Everyone is praising opencode - It is like Claude Code, or Codex (or Gemini CLI) except it is not tied to a corporation. It works with models from all of them, and other models, not from these corporations.

I had installed opencode long time ago, but never used it.

Today, I decided to give it a go.

As I was exploring, I came across /editor command. ¹ I had expected /editor command to open a file in an editor

But the command does not take argument/filename. So how would it know which file(s) to open? 🤔

So I asked opencode itself. But it hallucinated. Says, “Select the file from the sidebar”

Except there is none.

OK, there is a sidebar, but it does not list any files. It lists stats about the project.

It told me how to toggle the sidebar. (Not its fault. I told it ‘There is no sidebar’)

Finally I decided to solve this the old fashioned way.

RTFM

The documentation says:

Open external editor for composing messages.

Then I shared this “knowledge” with opencode.

Essentially, I taught opencode about its own features/commands

🤦

I wanted to share my conversations with opencode here, with a link. Luckily, there is a /share command.

The /share feature is great (but Amp already has this built-in and works better) But the UI can be better.

During the conversation with any agent, there are several back and forth.

This is not obvious when viewing the same on the shared link (at least to me, at first) that there are several dialogue in this conversation.

Only the first one is shown.

I thought it shared only part of the conversation. (bug/feature 🤷‍♂️)

Turns out there is a hamburger menu like thing on the left, when clicked with precision opens subsequent dialogues. Clicking on the appropriate one is not easy.

I would have preferred that each dialog had separate anchor within the page that can be linked to, separately.

I’m not giving up on opencode yet.

The first impression isn’t great.

By the way, My favorite coding assistant, Amp has stopped supporting VS Code extension, and is asking the users to use AMP CLI instead.

Maybe that is the one I’ll use.

Or that and opencode

🤷‍♂️

Update: I asked opencode to commit this file, and to add suitable commit message. It did surprisingly good job, following the style of my existing messages. I’m impressed!

There is hope after all 😄

In past when used AI to generate commit message, it generated very verbose messages. Sometimes that may be a good thing, but not always.