opencode VS emacs-bedrock

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

I think the most straightforward way to a solid Emacs config is to use emacs-bedrock [1]. It's a very well curated set of packages that enhance the basic experience. It does leave you with plenty of room to fiddle, which is the beauty of Emacs to my mind. I personally use doom because I built my config on it for years, and am happy with my current setup, but if I started again I would go with emacs-bedrock to keep it more minimal.

[1] https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

gptel is great, its one of the must have packages for Emacs and I'm pretty sure that with time it will be one of the reasons to use Emacs like org-mode has been for a long time.

For people wanting to get up and running with vanilla Emacs (instead of a distribution) so that they can try out gptel sometime this week, I recommend emacs-bedrock: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

And for a gptel backend Gemini is the fastest route (excluding something local) from generating an API key to using a LLM in Emacs (for free).

Bonus points because Emacs is useful for things other than coding you can use gptel on your notes or any buffer really to ask/talk about stuff.

You can get some ideas from mine. It uses use-package, straight.el, company, flycheck, lsp… The structure I stole from bedrock.

If you need a staring point for configuring there's some nice light ones like emacs-bedrock and crafted-emacs, and also some fully pre-configured Emacs distributions that you can choose from (though those look harder to configure to one's personal needs to me, but I haven't tried them so wouldn't know).