opencode VS codex

Dax, the creator of OpenCode — an open-source coding agent, of all the people one might expect to disagree — put the case for hand-coding cleanly in a recent interview about Spec-Driven Development:

Pipa is our agent for studio operations at Lunch Pail Labs. She lives in Slack, is powered by E2B sandboxes, and uses OpenCode for the harness.

One reason I liked OpenSpec more than others, such as Kiro and SpecKit, is that OpenSpec is highly portable between coding assistants, codebases and stages of development. I've plugged OpenSpec into all sorts of projects, from infrastructure to Python libraries. I also work on diverse codebases, with a variety of AI friends that OpenSpec supports: OpenCode, Codex and Claude Code.

Beyond the big names, I would also keep an eye on OpenCode and T3 Code. OpenCode is a solid open-source, terminal-first option if you want a model-agnostic agent and bring your own provider setup. T3 Code is interesting for the opposite reason: it gives you an open-source GUI on top of the agents you may already pay for, like Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, or Cursor.

Brought to you by the infamous creator of OpenCode, who will exfiltrate all your data, then feign ignorance:

https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/10416

> reduce the risk of data exfiltration

Yet, their tools such as codex are able to read ALL FILES on my PC without explicit permission unless you spawn them within a container: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2847

It seems like OpenAI stealing sensitive data from their customers is not a big problem for them as it has been reported as an issue for almost a year now and currently has the 2nd most upvotes among open issues (they work on issues based on upvotes, so they claim).

It would be really, really great if Codex could support MCP Prompts[0]

This would allow us to deliver standard prompts across the team without having to sync manually or with scripts; keep everyone up to date. Even allow per-user customization of "skills" via server rendering of the prompts.

AFAIK, Codex is the only major harness to not support this.

[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/5059#issuecomment-453...

OpenAI's Codex CLI ships with a great editor-agent UX: shell tool, apply_patch, plan tracking, the lot. The catch — as of February 2026 it only speaks the OpenAI Responses API. Chat Completion support was dropped (codex-rs/model-provider-info/src/lib.rs: the WireApi enum has one variant, Responses). If you wanted to point it at a Chat-Completion-only endpoint — Ollama, LM Studio, your favorite Llama runner — you're out of luck.

Every edit goes through one tool: apply_patch. I standardized on it instead of a generic edit or write because Codex models are trained directly on the V4A patch format, and because structured diffs are easier to validate, retry, and explain than arbitrary file writes. V4A is OpenAI's diff envelope for Codex-family models — in Hookele, one payload can create, update, and delete files in a single call:

Looks like codex has it to since last week, https://github.com/openai/codex/releases/tag/rust-v0.130.0

This is also the story behind Codex itself climbing onto the GitHub trending board this week (#10 blip, 367 stars). The repo trending alongside addyosmani/agent-skills isn't a coincidence — it's a market signal that operators are pulling Codex into stacks where Claude Code already lives.