Claude the model is still insanely great IF (and perhaps, ONLY IF) you are willing to fork over the money for the API and use a harness like OpenCode.

Claude Code itself is complete trash. They had a massive headstart and now are routinely lapped by open source harnesses and then they STILL double down on not allowing e.g. OpenCode usage with the Max plan. Meanwhile, OpenAI lets you use whatever harness you want and its a beast. I recently did some testing and OpenAI's Pro plan on an opencode harness (GPT 5.5 XHigh) with parallel agent delegation absolutely smokes Claude Code 4.7 Max. These days Claude Code can barely even remember its CLAUDE.MD instructions. I'd say Opus 4.7 Max API is slightly better than GPT 5.5 XHigh, but not nearly enough that the API token price is at all justified.

Claude, I think is still better for business things like document generation, design, etc. especially via claude.ai interface (GDrive integrations and things like that are very useful). But for code generation and dev workflows, Claude Code is dropping the ball so hard its starting to look like a generational fumble.

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ApolloRising 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Why do you feel the OpenCode harness is better than the Claude code one? Just curious what you feel it is doing better?

	▲	idempotent_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		OpenCode harness is so good I'm surprised one of the big players hasn't bought them outright. Essentially their harness: * Removes all the system prompt cruft and bullshit that CC pumps into the prompt and pollutes context and shit like "adaptive thinking" * Is extremely good at keeping the model aligned with AGENTS.MD and opencode.json and using all the features available there (parallel agents, sub-sub agents, etc) For example, I'm working on a repo with 5 distinct components and I have a specialized agent for each component. CLAUDE.MD is just a markdown file where I say "Hey Claude always use X agent for X component. X agent has this prompt blah blah" and then pray Claude remembers to use it. opencode.json is a structured file used by the harness and it has ALWAYS coerced the model to use it, including being able for the agents to delegate subagents in parallel etc. This makes a massive difference. So if I have a feature that touches multiple components, OpenCode rips through it with the specialized subagents while Claude sits their spinning its wheels and occasionally remembering theres a specialized agent and then maybe once in a blue moon it will do it in parallel. With CC I feel like I need to do all these invocations and coercions. OpenCode, once you've got your opencode.json and agents defined, just works.