ETA: The above link is at the bottom of the original submission's README. (https://github.com/sst/opencode) I posted it without context, and I have no opinion on the matter. Please read theli0nheart's comment below for an X rebuttal.

As another comment by the authors said, they're still pretty early days, so there's a lot of missing documentation and functionality; that's the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge.

Two big differences:

1. opencode is much more "agentic": It will just take off and do loads of stuff without asking, whereas aider normally asks permission to do everything. It will make a change, the language server tells it the build is broken, it goes and searches for the file and line in the error message, reads it, and tries to fix it; rinse repeat, running (say) "go vet" and "go test" until it doesn't see anything else to do. You can interrupt it, of course, but it won't wait for you otherwise.

2. aider has much more specific control over the context window. You say exactly what files you want the LLM to be able to see and/or edit; and you can clear the context window when you're ready to move on to the next task. The current version of opencode has a way to "compact" the context window, where it summarizes for itself what's been done and then (it seems) drops everything else. But it's not clear exactly what's in and out, and you can't simply clear the chat history without exiting the program. (Or if you can, I couldn't find it documented anywhere.)

ETA: opencode will tell you how big the context window is, but not what's in the context (AFAICT).

3. As sort of a side effect of both of those, the "rtt" seems much shorter for opencode: lots of small actions with quick feedback for opencode, vs long contiguous responses for aider. But that could be more how I happened to use it than something specific.

I do feel like opencode's UI is more... "sparkling"? The screen is much more "managed", with windows, a status bar, more colors, etc. Aider is much more like the REPL loop of, say, python or sqlite3.

It would likely quickly devolve into typical editor config bikeshedding, only AI powered? At least for me, maybe someone smarter could streamline it enough to be useful though!

bind-key C-g display-popup -E -d "#{pane_current_path}" -xC -yC -w 80% -h 75% "lazygit"

not only does it allow you to see the diffs, but you can directly discard changes you don't want, stage, commit, etc.

The best experience I've had is to completely divorce editing from vibe coding. Ask the chatbot to do something, then review the results as if a junior developer submitted them - that means diffs and opening files in the editor.

Fundamentally I think these are really distinct operations. I understand why the kitchen sink IDEs jam the genAI tools into their UIs, but I don't think it's necessarily important to link the two functions.

sst/opencode I can use with my existing Copilot subscription, and select Claude Sonnet 4 freely. I never hit the limit before, and all friction is gone! If Google ever builds a better model, I can switch the same day, and keep my workflows, configs, etc.

Also, with Claude COde I always felt a little mistrust, since theoretically they benefit from providing a more expensive service. opencode doesn't have this misaligned incentive.

we're very focused on UX and less so on LLM performance. we use all the same system prompts/config as claude code

that said people do observe better performance because of out of the box LSP support - edit tools return errors and the LLM immediately fixes them

After a brief play last night, the biggest feature of aider I miss is more control over the context window -- saying "/clear" to re-start the conversation from scratch, or specifying files to add or remove as they become relevant or irrelevant. Not clear how much or how long files stay in the context window.

The other question I have is whether you use Anthropic's "prompt caching" [1] to reduce the cost of the long conversation?

[1] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...

I don't know if others share this sentiment but with all these tools/agents coming out, the main personal "metric" I look at when using them is happiness, rather than other more traditional metrics that I look at when evaluating tools.

It also doesn't prevent you from using an IDE at all, but still fits for people with text editors like Vim who doesn't want to use IDEs.

On the other hand, agent integrations in IDEs seem to often add a lot more widgets for interacting with agents, and often they put the agent is in its own little tab off to the side, and I find that harder to work with.

That's why, even though I love using IDEs and have never been a big terminal person, I much prefer using Claude Code in the terminal rather than using tools like Copilot in VSCode (ignoring the code quality differences). I just find it nicer to separate the two.

The portability of being able to really easily run Claude Code in whatever directory you want, and through SSH, is a nice bonus too.