OpenCode was the first open source agent I used, and my main workhorse after experimenting briefly with Claude Code and realizing the potential of agentic coding. Due to that, and because it's a popular an open source alternative, I want to be able to recommend it and be enthusiastic about it. The problem for me is that the development practices of the people that are working on it are suboptimal at best; they're con…
Isn't this pretty much the standard across projects that make heavy use of AI code generation? Using AI to generate all your code only really makes sense if you prioritize shipping features as fast as possible over the quality, stability and efficiency of the code, because that's the only case in which the actual act of writing code is the bottleneck.
Personally, I find this idea that "coding isn't the bottleneck" completely preposterous. Getting all of the API documentation, the syntax, organizing and typing out all of the text, finding the correct places in the code base and understanding the code base in general, dealing with silly compiler errors and type errors, writing a ton of error handling, dealing with the inevitable and inoraticable boilerplate of programming (unless you're one of those people that believe macros are actually a good idea and would meaningfully solve this), all are a regular and substantial occurrence, even if you aren't writing thousands of lines of code a day. And you need to write code in order to be able to get a sense for the limitations of the technology you're using and the shape of the problem you're dealing with in order to then come up with and iterate on a better architecture or approach to the problem. And you need to see your program running in order to evaluate whether it's functionality and design a satisfactory and then to iterate on that. So coding is actually the upfront costs that you need to pay in order to and even start properly thinking about a problem. So being able to get a prototype out quickly is very important. Also, I find it hard to believe that you've never been in a situation where you wanted to make a simple change or refactor that would have resulted in needing to update 15 different call sites to do properly in a way that was just slightly variable enough or complex enough that editor macros or IDE refactoring capabilities wouldn't be capable of.
That's not to mention the fact that if agentic coding can make deploying faster, then it can also make deploying the same amount at the same cadence easier and more relaxing.