Comment by gwd

Been using aider as my daily driver for a while, just gave opencode a spin last night.

As another comment by the authors said, they're still pretty early days, so there's a lot of missing documentation and functionality; that's the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge.

Two big differences:

1. opencode is much more "agentic": It will just take off and do loads of stuff without asking, whereas aider normally asks permission to do everything. It will make a change, the language server tells it the build is broken, it goes and searches for the file and line in the error message, reads it, and tries to fix it; rinse repeat, running (say) "go vet" and "go test" until it doesn't see anything else to do. You can interrupt it, of course, but it won't wait for you otherwise.

2. aider has much more specific control over the context window. You say exactly what files you want the LLM to be able to see and/or edit; and you can clear the context window when you're ready to move on to the next task. The current version of opencode has a way to "compact" the context window, where it summarizes for itself what's been done and then (it seems) drops everything else. But it's not clear exactly what's in and out, and you can't simply clear the chat history without exiting the program. (Or if you can, I couldn't find it documented anywhere.)

ETA: opencode will tell you how big the context window is, but not what's in the context (AFAICT).

3. As sort of a side effect of both of those, the "rtt" seems much shorter for opencode: lots of small actions with quick feedback for opencode, vs long contiguous responses for aider. But that could be more how I happened to use it than something specific.

I do feel like opencode's UI is more... "sparkling"? The screen is much more "managed", with windows, a status bar, more colors, etc. Aider is much more like the REPL loop of, say, python or sqlite3.