opencode VS neovim

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

Editors: I use Neovim with LazyVim as my default editor. I still use Visual Studio Code depending on the project and what I am testing.

My toolkit involves Neovim, Sidekick and Opencode. Former two are not important for this article, but the latter is the real game changer.

I built mclovin-ARCHived to automate the install of my Arch + i3wm + polybar + neovim + dotfiles setup. The name was a reference to McLovin from the movie Superbad, it was basically my own "superbad script".

That sentence contains the entire argument for terminal agents. The editor is wherever you want it to be. It can be Neovim on a remote dev box, VS Code on a laptop, Helix in a tmux session, or no editor at all if you're doing a batch migration. The agent doesn't care. It operates on files, not on buffers.

I thought that switching to neovim v0.12 would be as easy as downloading the binary , deleting the current one and replacing it with the new one. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Neovim website

Nobody said they are 1-to-1 compatible. Also, ideally lazy loading should happen on the plugin side instead of putting it on every user to configure, since neovim natively basically has everything needed for plugins to do the lazy loading of heavy parts[1] and if something is missing it probably is better to add it the hooks for it upstream in neovim instead of the plugin manager.

[1]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/35562#issuecomment-3...

Learn and use Neovim. ❌ I tried, but then I switched to zed.