The Vibe Coder Manifesto

At this point, coding by hand is a bottleneck that I am simply not willing to deal with anymore. There is this weird energy in the tech space right now where people are making memes about LLMs and coding agents. They say these tools can’t replace us or that they’ll never actually take programming jobs. I am not here to scare you, but the reality is that they surely might. Or maybe they won’t. Either way, if you actually sit down and read this, you are going to realize why vibe coding is the future of how we build things.

The Engine and the Paperweight

Before we get into the “how,” we need to have a serious talk about what an AI agent actually is. Most people think Claude or ChatGPT is the end-game, but they are wrong. Let’s use a car metaphor because it is the only way this makes sense. The models like your Claude or your GPT are the engine. They represent raw horsepower and intelligence. But an engine sitting on a garage floor is just a paperweight. It can’t take you to the gym and it can’t even turn itself on.

An agent like Claude Code is the actual car. It is the steering wheel, the tires, the GPS, and the pedals. When you use an agent, you aren’t just talking to a brain in a browser tab. You are sitting in a vehicle that has hands. It can reach into your file system, execute bash commands, and actually ship the code while you are just sitting in the passenger seat.

Why OpenCode is the Project Car

Then you have OpenCode. If Claude Code is a Tesla, OpenCode is the custom-built project car. A Tesla is sleek and fast, but the hood is welded shut. You use their engine and their rules. It is a total lockdown where you are stuck with one provider. If they change the pricing or the model gets dumber, you are toast.

I know some of you are going to say, “But I saw scripts and guides to run Ollama or GLM models in Claude Code!” Look, I’ve done the research. People are out there making custom scripts and messing with environment variables just to hack local models into Claude Code. And yeah, it works. But it isn’t “first class.” You are basically hot-wiring a Tesla. It’s janky, it’s unofficial, and it’s one update away from breaking.

OpenCode is an open chassis. It doesn’t ask you to hack the system; it asks you which engine you want to bolt in. It gives you the steering and the wheels but tells you to bring your own brain. In OpenCode, you just /connect to whichever provider you want. It’s seamless. It’s easy. You want to drop in a Claude engine today? Great. You want to swap it for a GPT engine tomorrow because the benchmarks changed? Easy. You want to run a local model via Ollama because you are paranoid about privacy? It’s a first-class citizen here. You aren’t fighting the tool; the tool is working for you.

The Harness is the Difference

The reason I am even writing this is because a friend asked me if Copilot is any good in OpenCode. He tried Copilot in VS Code and it felt mid. Look, I am going to be real here. The VS Code agent harness completely sucks. It doesn’t matter how good the model is if the harness is limiting what it can actually do. The model is a brain in a jar, but the agent is the robot with the keys to your house. It doesn’t matter where you get the brain. It matters what the harness lets that brain do to your codebase.

Life as a Vibe Coder

I have built a ton of projects and extensions using OpenCode with Sonnet and Opus. Two of my favorites are Spottui, which is Spotify in the terminal, and Vicify. The magic of vibe coding is that I was SSH-ing into my laptop prompting OpenCode on the way to dinner, while hanging out with friends, or just walking around. Even when I am sitting at my desk, I just prompt the agent and then go on YouTube to watch my fav. creators or music videos of movies, full on entertainment. I am enjoying the process of building more than I ever have because the friction is gone.

A Note for the Students

If you are a student and you have that GitHub Student Pack, you already have a Copilot Pro subscription. Stop fighting the tools and just plug that subscription into OpenCode. Actually enjoy your life for once. Stop worrying about the syntax and start focusing on the vibes and the architecture.

Keep prompting <3.