Yeah, it's very confusing especially if you're not in the loop and their docs were only updated recently and was confusing during the v1 -> v2 transition weeks / months ago.
So far, "OpenCode" has gone through several possible definitions:
- OpenCode Terminal / CLI - This is what you get normally. Runs a service in the background and the CLI is your interface.
- OpenCode Desktop - Instead of a CLI, you get a desktop interface.
Most users usually stop here. You just install the app and you connect wherever.
So there's the services where they both make money and make things easier for users:
- OpenCode Console - Basically the serving platform for both Zen and Go, and has expanded to a hosted inference gateway and somewhat similar to OpenRouter or a managed LiteLLM. Has the option to BYOK if you have existing AI platform accounts so it charges those instead of Zen, and that's what got compromised.
- OpenCode Zen - the API service they host if you want to get access to providers but don't want to pay individually per API platform. Similar to OpenRouter. I noticed they're kinda slowly dropping the Zen moniker.
- OpenCode Go - the subscription service that they host that features open weight models and select low-cost models from frontier labs. Has different policies when it comes to privacy and retention compared to Zen.
- OpenCode Black - a limited-time, limited access subscription service that grants access to frontier models. Not sure if this is still alive or not.
I've been on the API-only mentality for months and all the open models were definitely the stuff I loved the most. Kimi K2.5, 2.7 and Deepseek v4 were among my favorites, while sparingly using Opus or whatever OpenAI had for specific situations.
But ever since I've switched to one of the $100-tier subs, I can see why a lot of the people on it don't really discuss the open models often. I'd still use it especially when it comes to sensitive inputs, but for most work, what you get on OpenAI or Anthropic is really more than enough.
It really got even better when they also made their cheaper models up to par if not better than the open models.
I do think the crowd for open models are out there, especially when you see trillions of tokens running for them on OpenCode or OpenRouter leaderboards.
I haven't even considered using MCP for locally-running apps! I mean I used to, but they almost always got associated with cloud service access and integrations nowadays, and most local stuff is trivially handled with agent skills.
Thanks for the tips. TIL about BTT having MCP support. Crank looks very promising too, since it looks like a more effective Shortcuts and Hazel replacement
Funnily enough, my first impression for this project was to use it for non-code and planning first.
I agree, I don't think people are going to remotely pair-prog with this when it's existed in the past and most work on their own and let their pull requests do the talking.
But I say non-code and planning because I've definitely strategized with AI before and have scrapped a good chunk of it because I overlooked details that my team shared. Being able to get that on an active session with context shared across all members as it's debated sounds good and would've reduced turnaround time.
I remember the Opencode folks mention about gangprompting before and I guess this is one take of it, besides adding an Opencode bot on Slack and hoping that's competent enough for the work that needs doing. I've never tried it myself, so I'm not gonna criticize it, but I'm sure it's an idea people want to see if it's effective.
Realistically, what I use about its agent stuff is:
- reliable notification pings either via what your terminal app uses (e.g., ghostty's) or system or just within herdr only
- if absolutely necessary, be able to tell agent sessions to observe and run commands on a herdr pane (security beware, for obvious reasons)
- herdr --remote which is basically a quick SSH -> attach to herdr on a remote
- prefix+g (equivalent to prefix+w in tmux) presents itself nicer, has binds for agent state filtering and its /search imho is mildly nicer than tmux's
Arguably, you can have the same points in others if you know how to configure tmux or zellij already, so if you're comfortable with that then you really don't have to use herdr.
There is a cross platform terminal notification cli that I used to vibe code notifications in like 5minutes and I have traffic light indicators on my tmux panes showing when an agent is waiting. The other things are also all possible. An agent is super happy to remote control tmux, it knows all the commands!
Yep, I did similar stuff too! Used something like ntfy to push notifs to an Android or just whatever commands are available on the OS you're in (e.g., `notify-send`). And for state reads herdr has `herdr pane read` while you can happily accomplish similar results with `tmux capture-pane` or similar.
Nice. I did transcriptions on a casual project before that went through something like this. Transcribing videos or audio files with Whisper? Very common. But having to swap it out with Qwen3 or a different family of ASR models? Oops, not as straightforward. For Qwen for example you gotta deal with the forced aligner or it won't be good as subtitles, and then gotta deal with some requirements and considerations if you want to make use of MLX on a Mac or something.
Will definitely check this out since it sounds like it eases through the pain of dealing with these.
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