OpenCode: The Open-Source AI Coding Agent for the Terminal

OpenCode is an open-source AI coding agent that runs in your terminal, similar in concept to Claude Code or Aider. It supports multiple LLM providers, is fully extensible, and keeps your code local.

What OpenCode does

• Interactive terminal UI for AI-assisted coding
• Reads and edits files directly in your codebase
• Supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Ollama, and OpenRouter
• LSP integration for code context awareness
• Git-aware — understands your repo structure and diff history
• Open-source (MIT license) — fully auditable and self-hostable

OpenCode vs the alternatives

How to install OpenCode

# Install via npm
npm install -g opencode-ai

# Or via Homebrew
brew install opencode

# Run in your project directory
opencode

The token cost of agentic coding

Coding agents are significantly more token-intensive than simple autocomplete. A single OpenCode session handling a medium-complexity task might involve:

• 5-20 LLM calls to read, plan, and edit files
• 2,000-10,000 input tokens per call (code context)
• 500-2,000 output tokens per call (generated code)

That's 10,000-200,000 tokens per coding session. At gpt-4o pricing, a single complex task can cost $0.50-$3.00. Claude Sonnet is similar. Switching to Groq with Llama-3.3-70B cuts the cost to under $0.10 per session with a speed improvement.

Agentic coding tools can easily consume 10-100x more tokens than you expect. Track usage from the first session to avoid billing surprises.