Claude Code is fairly notoriously token inefficient as far as coding agent/harnesses go (i come from aider pre-CC). It's only viable because the Max subscriptions give you approximately unlimited token budget, which resets in a few hours even if you hit the limit. But this also only works because cloud models have massive token windows (1M tokens on opus right now) which is a bit difficult to make happen locally with the VRAM needed.
replyAnd if you somehow managed to open up a big enough VRAM playground, the open weights models are not quite as good at wrangling such large context windows (even opus is hardly capable) without basically getting confused about what they were doing before they finish parsing it.
I use CC at work, so I haven't explored other options. Is there a better one to use locally? I presumed they were all going to be pretty similar.
replyIf you want to experiment with same-harness-different-models Opencode is classically the one to use. After their recent kerfluffle with Anthropic you'll have to use API pricing for opus/sonnet/haiku which makes it kind of a non-starter, but it lets you swap out any number of cloud or local models using e.g. ollama or z.ai or whatever backend provider you like.
replyI'd rate their coding agent harness as slightly to significantly less capable than claude code, but it also plays better with alternate models.
I am hopeful the leaked claude code narrows the capability, perhaps even googles offering will be viable once they borrow some ideas from claude.
replyI have good experience with Mistral Vibe.
replyOpenCode
replyCan't you use Claude caveman mode?
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replyI don't get why I would use Claude Code when OpenCode, Cursor, Zed, etc. all exist, are "free" and work with virtually any llm. Seems like a weird use case unless I'm missing something.
replyFrom my experience, Claude Code is just better. Although I recently started using Zed and it’s pretty good
replypreviously I have found claude code to be just better than the alternatives, using large models or local. It is, however, closer now and not much excuse for the competition after the claude code leak. Personally, I will be giving this a go with OpenCode.
reply> I don't get why I would use Claude Code when OpenCode, Cursor, Zed, etc. all exist, are "free" and work with virtually any llm. Seems like a weird use case unless I'm missing something.
replyI'm with you on this. I've tried Gemma and Claude code and it's not good. Forgets it can use bash!
However, Gemma running locally with Pi as the harness is a beast.
this is like asking why use intellij or vscode or … when there is vim and emacs
replyNo it's more like, why use a Microsoft paid for distro of nvim when lazyvim, astronvim exist
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