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Comment by arkariarn | Hacker News Reader

I see some anthropic claude code people are reading the comments. A day or two ago I watched a video by theo t3.gg on whether claude got dumber. Even though he was really harsh on anthropic and said some mean stuff. I thought some of the points he was raising about claude code was quite apt. Especially when it comes to the harness bloat. I really hope the new features now stop and there is a real hard push for polish and optimization. Otherwise I think a lot of people will start exploring less bloated more optimized alternatives. Focus on making the harness better and less token consuming.

https://youtu.be/KFisvc-AMII?is=NskPZ21BAe6eyGTh

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Everything else aside, their brief "experiment" with removing CC support from the Pro plan got me seriously considering other options. I've been wary of vendor lock-in the whole time, but it was a useful reminder. (opencode+openrouter will probably be my first port of call)

I'm 3 weeks into switching from CC to OpenCode, and in some ways it is far superior to CC right out of the box, and I've maybe burned $200 in tokens to make a private fork that is my ultimate development and personal agent platform. Totally worth it.

Still use CC at work because team standards, but I'd take my OpenCode stack over it any day.

I find OpenCode vastly superior. Only thing missing is Vim mode but I saw a fork that someone implemented it. I really like being able to click on a previous message I sent to revert to that point in the conversation. You can revert in CC by pressing Escape twice but the “menu” it takes you to for picking the message is terrible because it only shows your messages. Also, expanding subagent/tools/thinking/etc. blocks is super intuitive in OpenCode whereas CC’s view when you press CTRL+O is also terrible and hard to understand at first glance.

I’m in the process of doing this as well - hackability is such a massive moat.

Care to share what you changed, maybe even the code?

I've got to do some cleanup before sharing (yay vibe coding) but the big things I've changed so far:

1) Curated a set of models I like and heavily optimized all possible settings, per agent role and even per skill (had to really replumb a lot of stuff to get it as granular as I liked)

2) Ported from sqlite to postgresql, with heavily extended schema. I generate embeddings for everything, so every aspect of my stack is a knowledge graph that can be vector searched. Integrated with a memory MCP server and auditing tools so I can trace anything that happens in the stack/cluster back to an agent action and even thinking that was related to the action. It really helps refine stuff.

3) Tight integration of Gitea server, k3s with RBAC (agents get their own permissions in the cluster), every user workspace is a pod running opencode web UI behind Gitea oauth2.

4) Codified structure of `/projects/<monorepo>/<subrepos>` with simpler browserso non-technical family members can manage their work easier (agents handle all the management and there are sidecars handling all gitops transparent to the user)

5) Transparent failover across providers with cooldown by making model definitions linked lists in the config, so I can use a handful of subscriptions that offer my favorite models, and fail over from one to the next as I hit quota/rate limits. This has really cut my bill down lately, along with skipping OpenRouter for my favorite models and going direct to Alibaba and Xiaomi so I can tailor caching and stuff exactly how I want.

6) Integrated filebrowser, a fork of the Milkdown Crepe markdown editor, and codemirror editor so I don't even need an IDE anymore. I just work entirely from OpenCode web UI on whatever device is nearest at the moment. I added support for using Gemma 4 local on CPU from my phone yesterday while waiting in line at a store yesterday.

Those are the big ones off the top of my head. Im sure there's more. I've probably made a few hundred other changes, it just evolves as I go.

The solution IMO is to switch to an agent harness wrapper solution that uses CLI-wrapping or ACP to connect to different coding agents. This is the only way that works across OpenAI, Claude and Gemini.

There are a few out there (latest example is Zed's new multi-agent UI), but they still rely on the underlying agent's skill and plugin system. I'm experimenting with my own approach that integrates a plugin system that can dynamically change the agent skillset & prompts supplied via an integrated MCP server, allowing you to define skills and workflows that work regardless of the underlying agent harness.

never ever forget theo's gpt 5 hype video and then him having to walk it back.

its very clear that theres money or influence exchanging hands behind the scenes with certain content creators, the information, and openai.

literally just `git reset --hard <random hash from 3 months ago>` would fix this

That implies it's broken. Juicing revenue and slashing opex at the expense of brand and customer retention is the feature.

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