I Tried OpenCode — The Open-Source Coding Agent With 160K Stars — Honest First Impression

I first heard about OpenCode the same way most developers did — a thread on X where someone posted a screenshot of their terminal running a full AI coding session completely offline, on a Raspberry Pi, without a single API call leaving the machine. It had 40,000 likes. The GitHub repo link in the thread gained 8,000 stars in 24 hours.

That was three months ago. OpenCode now sits at 160,000+ GitHub stars and claims 7.5 million monthly active developers. For context, that's roughly the same user base as VS Code's Python extension. This isn't a niche tool anymore.

So I cleared a week in my calendar, cancelled my Cursor subscription, and went all-in on OpenCode to answer the question everyone's been asking: is it actually good, or just good at getting stars?

The first thing that stands out is the provider philosophy. OpenCode supports 75+ AI providers out of the box — from OpenAI and Anthropic to Groq, Together.ai, local Ollama models, and everything in between. You pick your brain, OpenCode wraps the interface.

This sounds basic, but it's a fundamental architectural decision that separates OpenCode from Cursor. Cursor is built around their own model infrastructure. OpenCode is infrastructure-agnostic. If OpenAI raises prices tomorrow, you switch providers in a config file. You're never locked in.

The second differentiator is true air-gapped deployment. OpenCode can run in environments with no internet access whatsoever — pair it with a local Ollama server running Qwen or Llama, and you have a fully offline AI coding agent. For developers working in regulated industries (healthcare, finance, defense), this isn't a nice-to-have — it's the only viable option.

Installation is a single command:

npm install -g opencode-ai

Then you initialize a project:

opencode init

The config wizard walks you through picking your provider, setting API keys (or pointing to a local Ollama URL), and choosing a default model. First impressions: genuinely smooth. Better onboarding than I expected from an open-source project.

Day 2 I hit the first friction point: the VS Code extension. It's functional but visually feels like a 2022 project compared to Cursor's polished sidebar. The diff viewer works, the inline suggestions work, but there's a roughness to the UX that you feel immediately if you've been a Cursor user for a while.

I threw three real projects at it: a TypeScript API refactor (existing codebase, ~12K lines), a Python data pipeline with unit tests, and a React component rebuild.

The TypeScript refactor was impressive. OpenCode maintained context across multiple files far better than I expected. It correctly identified that a utility function was being used in 6 different places before suggesting changes — something that trips up many coding agents.

The Python pipeline was where it earned my respect. I ran it with a local Qwen 32B model via Ollama. The suggestions were slower (about 3x Cursor's speed on the same task), but the code was correct, and nothing left my machine. For a security-conscious environment, that trade-off is worth it.

The React rebuild was the weakest performance. Component generation was fine, but it struggled with maintaining consistent design patterns across a larger component tree. This felt like a context window issue more than an agent issue.

After a week, my honest take is that OpenCode is an exceptional tool for a specific type of developer, and an okay tool for most others.

It's exceptional if you: work in air-gapped or regulated environments, want full control over your AI provider and costs, are comfortable with a slightly rougher UX, or are contributing to an open-source project and want your editor to match your values.

It's a step down from Cursor if you: want a polished, seamless UX out of the box, primarily work in frontend/UI contexts where visual context matters, or rely heavily on Cursor's proprietary model optimizations.

The 160K stars aren't hype. But they're also not proof that it's better than Cursor for everyone. The truth is simpler: OpenCode fills a real gap that Cursor deliberately ignores. And in 2026, that gap is growing.