Comment by usernametaken29
4 days ago
I wish they’d invest more time in performance improvements over code mods. I recently switched to pi which uses an order of magnitude less RAM (hundreds vs dozens) and noticeably less CPU on my machine… OpenCode is really nice but it’s about as heavy as antigravity and is substandard in features…
Pi is also super context-efficient. The out-of-the-box system prompt before adding tools and skills is like dozens of tokens.
OpenCode was thousands or tens of thousands last time I checked. Not sure if this has been improved.
true but from what i found, the opencode team tested these prompts and evaluated that a bigger prompt is better for some models, overall.
very possible that a smaller more custom system prompt (+ custom tools) could work better for specific use cases.
I guess it's fine if you don't mind paying for the extra tokens.
In my experience, what works for one model in terms of system prompt doesn't necessarily transfer to another model, so I would be concerned that a large system prompt would end up being a "jack of all trades, master of none" situation where your giant prompt has to try to account for the eccentricities of every single model, and might even include details that add confusion for some models.
And pi has been eye-opening for me in terms of how well newer models perform with basically no system prompt. It makes me wonder how much of the default system prompt is essentially cruft which was added to support older models which needed more guidance, and is still in there.