OpenCode

I'm sort of afraid to write this post to be honest. I reread my AI post to make sure I don't contradict myself or reiterate too many points in this one. I will admit it: I have been using OpenCode to write a chat application. It's not Bonfire; this one I'm making is going to be called Hideout. I have not written much of the code for it manually; rather, I have been prompting OpenCode's Big Pickle model to generate all of it.

I'm actually impressed by it. I have been using AI to help write code for a while, mostly for troubleshooting errors or asking it to remind me of how something works. I always thought that I would never trust an LLM enough to straight up write files directly on my computer for me. This changed when I ran the command to install OpenCode through my terminal.

I was merely curious and now after about 3 days of using it, I have a functioning encrypted text chat app. It's still missing a lot of features, but I think in its current state it could function as a decent alpha. There is no way I would have been able to create an app this quickly with my normal workflow as I have with OpenCode. I still need technical knowledge; OpenCode can't access Supabase for me, so I have to manually configure that. There's probably a way to configure the locally-run Supabase CLI, but I'm fine with maintaining independent control over how my database is used for now.

On one hand, I think this is amazing. I can do the fun part of development (seeing my ideas come to fruition) without having to do the grueling work (banging my head against a problem for an hour trying to figure out why the console.log is outputting null). Using OpenCode makes me feel like I'm standing in Limbo (sorry for the Fandom wiki link), and anything I imagine coalesces in front of me with but a word.

On the other hand, I feel a lot of shame. The model I'm using is hosted in a massive data center somewhere, hogging up power and water. I tried using locally hosted models for this, but my system is not powerful enough for an LLM to code. Coding agents require a large context size, which essentially means they need a lot of memory. Additionally, to do anything meaningful, they need to be trained on billions upon billions of parameters. The locally hosted models that would be on par with Big Pickle are far too resource demanding for my machine. I ran gpt-oss-20b, which seems to be the sweet spot between performance and capability on my machine, and it literally told me that it couldn't implement a feature I requested because it was too difficult.

Then again, maybe I shouldn't be letting AI write everything for me. Maybe I should still be writing the code and just have my local models correct it for me; however, after what I've seen Big Pickle is capable of, the programmer in me sees that concern as trivial. I have a nearly full-functioning chat app in 3 days - normally this sort of work would have taken an individual developer months to finish. A team could certainly take a lot less time, but there is the overhead of coordination, pull requests, etc that adds delay. With OpenCode, I did work that normally takes weeks in 3 days.

Am I accruing tech debt? Yes. I would have to comb through the code of this new app to fully understand how all of it works, but it's using a tech stack that I'm already familiar with. As I watch the Pickle's "thoughts" scroll down my screen after I prompt it, I understand what it's outputting. I can read the errors when the code runs and have an idea of what the problem might be. I have gone through enough development to know what can be accomplished with the code itself; the only limitation was time and effort.

But that justification feels too shaky to me. I can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong, that somehow this isn't how it should be done, yet all the code is there. I just typed maybe around 50-80 prompts and it all appeared. Sometimes it didn't work, but I requested for it to work, and it did. It's unconscionable how simple it is. I just don't know what to make of it at this point. Let me know what you think. Should I burn everything that the Pickle made for me? Should I keep going with using it? Is there some kind of middle ground that can be attained?