So I wanted to move away from chat to a terminal-based interface to run more agents and eventually give control to my computer.

Options were:

Tool Style Models Open source? My take
OpenCode Terminal/TUI GPT, Claude, Gemini, local models, etc. ✅ Best fit for what you’re describing
Aider Terminal Many providers/local models ✅ Excellent if you want a very Git-centric workflow
Codex CLI Terminal OpenAI models ✅ Very capable, but less model-agnostic
Claude Code Terminal Claude ❌ Excellent agent, but not open source
Cline VS Code Many models ✅ Better if you still want an IDE

I wanted to try the open-source models, so I decided to go ahead with OpenCode.

Quick setup instructions

  1. Ensure you have npm and Node.js installed.

    To check:

    node --version
npm --version

  2. Next, install OpenCode:

    npm install -g opencode-ai

    This means:

    • npm → Node’s package manager
    • install → install something
    • -g → install it globally, so opencode is available from any directory
    • opencode-ai → the OpenCode CLI package

    To check:

    opencode --version

  3. Once you have it installed, you can close PowerShell and open a new one.

  4. Launch OpenCode:

    opencode

  5. This should open the OpenCode interface.

  6. To connect to the model:

    /connect

  7. Again, we have multiple options now:

    1. You can try ChatGPT if you already have Plus or Pro
    2. Since I wanted to try open-source models, I decided to set up OpenRouter:
    Provider Top Models Quota / Limit RPM Context Window Best For
    Google AI Studio Gemini 3.6 Flash 1,500 req/day 15 1M tokens Long-context analysis & massive codebases
    Groq Llama 3.3 70B, Mixtral 1,000 req/day 30 128K tokens Real-time apps & fast agentic loops
    Cerebras Llama 3.3 70B ~1M tokens/day 30 1M tokens Batch processing & high throughput
    GitHub Models GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek R1 50-1,000 req/day 15 8K-128K tokens Occasional frontier model access
    Mistral Codestral ~1B tokens/month Varies 32K-256K tokens Heavy coding workloads & high volume
    OpenRouter Space Bunny, Laguna, North Mini Code 50 req/day 20 Varies Model routing & experimentation

  8. I decided to create an OpenRouter account and get the API key to use it in the OpenCode setup.

  9. Now, if you do not have any credits, you will be restricted to 50 requests per day, which I exhausted pretty soon, so I recommend adding $10 in credits so that you do not have this restriction.

You should be all set up!

I started with commands like cleaning up my disk space, setting up my git repo locally, etc.! Will add more things soon!

Originally published on Substack.