General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20268 min read

OpenCode

OpenCode is an open-source AI coding agent for the terminal, developed by Anomaly Innovations, Inc., that connects large language models to a developer's local codebase so the agent can read and edit files, run shell commands, and complete multi-step programming tasks. It is written in TypeScript, released under the MIT license, and works with more than 75 LLM providers, including locally hosted models.¹^•² The project is available as a terminal interface, a desktop application, and, in version 2, a web app.³

Key fact	Detail
What it is	Open-source AI coding agent for the terminal by Anomaly Innovations, Inc.; MIT license, TypeScript¹^•⁴
Model support	75+ LLM providers through the AI SDK and Models.dev, including local models; credentials stored in `~/.local/share/opencode/auth.json`²
Built-in agents	`build` (full access) and `plan` (read-only, denies edits and asks before bash), switched with the Tab key¹
Adoption	Roughly 650,000 monthly active users grew to nearly 8 million, with almost 1 million daily active users; about 213,000 GitHub stars⁵^•¹
Security posture	The agent is not sandboxed; the permission system prompts for confirmation but is not security isolation⁶
Commercial plans	OpenCode Zen pay-as-you-go ($20 minimum balance plus a $1.23 card processing fee) and OpenCode Go at $10 per month⁷^•³
Current versions	v1.19.0 released 11 October 2026; OpenCode 2 available through `opencode upgrade --major`⁸

History

OpenCode has a two-repository origin. Kujtim Hoxha created the first repository, opencode-ai/opencode, on 16 March 2025, written in Go. About six weeks later, on 30 April 2025, the team behind SST (Serverless Stack) created a second project with the same name, sst/opencode, rewritten in TypeScript. The two developed in parallel, and community issues such as "Two Parallel Repos" (May 2025) and "is this from SST?" (June 2025) recorded the resulting confusion, including the discovery that the opencode.ai domain pointed to the SST repository rather than the original one.⁹

The SST-side repository grew faster and eventually became the canonical project. It was transferred to anomalyco/opencode under Anomaly Innovations, and the original Go repository was archived on 18 September 2025 with about 10,900 stars. Hoxha left the project that July, announcing that he had continued the work with the Charm team under the new name Crush.⁹ A later documentation commit confirmed that the move from sst/opencode to anomalyco/opencode was a rename of the same repository, not a fork, with the old path issuing a 301 redirect.¹⁰

Dax Raad, co-founder of OpenCode, attributed the project's growth partly to positioning: no competing coding agent had claimed the open-source category, and the team shipped a good-enough harness first and improved it after gaining market share. He also said the team turned Anthropic's blocking of Claude Code integration into a growth lever by partnering with OpenAI and other model providers.⁵

Features

Model-agnostic providers. OpenCode uses the Vercel AI SDK and the Models.dev catalog to support more than 75 LLM providers, and it can run local models. Providers are added with the /connect command and configured in an opencode.json file, where a baseURL option supports proxies and custom endpoints, and blacklist or whitelist arrays hide models from the picker.² For users who do not want to manage provider configuration, OpenCode Zen offers a curated set of models that the team has tested and benchmarked for coding agents, sold pay-as-you-go with a $20 minimum balance and a $1.23 card processing fee.⁷

Agents and permissions. Two built-in primary agents ship by default: build, a full-access agent for development work, and plan, a read-only agent that denies file edits and asks permission before running bash commands. Custom agents are defined as Markdown files or JSONC configuration entries, combining a system prompt, model preference, and permissions; subagents run in child sessions with fresh context.¹^•¹¹ The permission system supports allow, ask, and deny actions per tool, with wildcard pattern matching that covers built-in, custom, and MCP tools, and per-command bash rules such as allowing git diff while asking before git push.¹¹

No sandbox. The project's security policy states plainly that OpenCode does not sandbox the agent: the permission system exists as a UX feature to keep users aware of what the agent is doing, not as security isolation, and users needing true isolation are told to run OpenCode inside a Docker container or virtual machine. Server mode is opt-in; without the OPENCODE_SERVER_PASSWORD setting the HTTP server runs unauthenticated with a warning.⁶

Adoption and benchmarks

OpenCode is one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools by usage: The Pragmatic Engineer reported growth from roughly 650,000 monthly active users to nearly 8 million, with almost 1 million daily active users, in a May 2026 interview with co-founder Dax Raad.⁵ The GitHub repository passed 171,000 stars in early 2026 and stood at about 213,000 stars with 28,500 forks by October 2026.¹²^•¹ OpenCode is also among the coding agents that adopted Anthropic's Agent Skills as an open standard, alongside Cursor, Goose, and Amp.¹³

Benchmark results depend heavily on the model paired with the harness. One comparison of agentic CLI tools reported OpenCode with the top combined score (81.6%) and the lowest cost of any capable agent at $1.03 per task.¹⁴ A controlled Builder.io test holding the model constant (Claude Sonnet 4.5) found Claude Code faster, 9 minutes 9 seconds versus 16 minutes 20 seconds across four tasks, while OpenCode wrote more tests, 94 versus 73, and ran the full existing suite; the same test found that all three models inside OpenCode reformatted existing code without being asked, producing noisy diffs.¹² Academic work on harness effects found that harness choice induces up to a 40-fold difference in tokens per solved task while paired pass-rate differences stay within 0 to 8 percentage points, and identified a model-independent OpenCode failure fingerprint of idle loops that exhaust the time cap; notably, OpenCode does not enforce passing tests before commits, as seen in issues reporting commits and pushes before user verification despite configured approval prompts.¹⁵^•²⁴

Among the documented problems is issue #3176: while managing sessions, the agent executed git add . across every file in the working directory, checking neither repository size nor .gitignore rules and asking no permission from the user, which brought a repository holding 54,000 files and 45 GB to a severe degradation.¹⁶

Security incidents

Three advisories have been published on the repository. In January 2026, GHSA-c83v-7274-4vgp (CVE-2026-22813, critical, CVSS 9.4) described how a malicious website could abuse the web UI's server URL override to achieve cross-site scripting on http://localhost:4096, then run arbitrary commands through the API's /pty/ endpoints; versions before 1.1.10 were affected.¹⁷ A companion high-severity advisory, GHSA-vxw4-wv6m-9hhh, covered arbitrary command execution through the unauthenticated HTTP server.¹⁸

In September 2026, GHSA-632h-h47v-g4x4 (high) showed that a webpage could send a cross-site request to the /global/upgrade endpoint of opencode serve, which accepted a general npm package specifier as its target and would install an attacker-controlled package whose lifecycle scripts ran with the user's privileges. Versions 1.14.30 through 1.18.21 installed via npm, pnpm, or Bun were affected; version 1.18.22 validated the target as a semantic version and added content-aware request parsing. Datadog Security Labs reported that the 82 vulnerable releases received more than 647,000 downloads between September 17 and 23, about 38.9% of OpenCode downloads in that interval.¹⁹^•²⁰

Versions and business

Version 1.19.0, released 11 October 2026, added opencode upgrade --major to move to OpenCode 2 and changed updates to be installed manually through /update rather than automatically.⁸ OpenCode 2, built on the Effect framework, is available as a terminal interface, desktop app, or web app accessed with opencode pair, and introduces a permissions model of action-resource-effect statements plus experimental binary policies that only ever tighten what permissions allow.³^•²¹ Versions 1 and 2 both use the opencode command and cannot be installed side by side under the default name.²²

The commercial side runs through Anomaly Innovations, Inc., which holds SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 compliance and describes its mission as open-source developer tools with local-first execution.²³ Beyond Zen pay-as-you-go, OpenCode Go is a $10 per month subscription granting access to open-source models.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Computing and digital systems › Modern AI: foundation models, generative AI, and the AI industry › AI companies, people, and products › AI products and assistants › AI agents and developer tools

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 19, 2026; Oct 15, 2026 · Edited: Sep 19, 2026; Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026 · Last review: Oct 15, 2026

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