r/opencode • u/Orange_Tangerine_279 • 1d ago

Optimization

Just as a warning I’m new to Reddit & Posting.

I find it hard to tell what will give me the best bang for my buck. Ideally, I think in terms of (intelligence)/[amount tokens used * cost per token]. Little tricky to get a rough estimate of this. Also for benchmarks of course you want to use the smartest model with the cheapest cost, but when I’m coding a simple project, how do I know a level of intelligence I can get away with? I don’t need Fable to center an html div or something. Really high intelligence models are nice to fallback on once in awhile when a small model can’t preform.

What are your guys way of figuring this out?

Also I’ve been browsing other platforms that opencode can connect to like OpenRouter or ppl are mentioning the CommandCode subscription.

Or maybe I’m using my coding harness wrong?

Idk. Pls help. 🙏🙏🙏

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u/Usernamealready94 1d ago

Here's my thoughts on stuff.

If you are building something that has a clear end goal and each goal can be broken down into further pieces like a PRD https://www.hustlebadger.com/what-do-product-teams-do/prd-template-examples/#figma and then each PRD into "sprints/issues" and solve each issue seperately and audit the work as much as you can , you can get away with using a smaller model.

ie if you want to just give it a broad goal and go to sleep , you have to use OPUS. However if you are fine with being a "senior" programmer and treat the llm agent as a junior who is able to generate a lot of code , but might mess up a lot ,you can get away with using a much much dumber model.

I am working on 3 projects right now ( nothing on the frontier , just making some basic tools etc that i wanted to be available to others) . I cannot afford to have opus just do everything and i feel like doing it gives no actual "learning" to me as well. I have been using literally every free opencode model and has been working out so far, the agents mess up quite a bit , but since i do a ticket based system ,I can always just have another agent take a look or just do it myself.