On Opencode Go and Pi
What value does $10 bring to your development?
Short answer: a lot. Long answer? Read through.
The beginning
So my journey with AI used for coding started in late 2023, when I was completing my Bachelor’s and started working. At that time Claude Code was not a thing (crazy to think about a time without it) and I was still using the greatest shortcut of the developers, the CMD+C/CMD+V (CTRL+C/CTRL+V for my Windows followers) and I was copy-pasting answers from ChatGPT or Claude, and that for simple questions worked just fine: I had my little code snippet, asked the genie1 why it didn’t work, got an answer that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, and then went on with my activity or continued the loop with the genie. This worked for a year, I was still into simpler tasks and I was not relying on it too much, just using it for some smart research, to be able to get a valid answer without spending too much time on websites.
Then Claude Code came.
The agentic way
At first I wasn’t sold on this thing, but seeing it from videos and in action it really made me think ‘wow, this is cool’. The way it worked through your files and pinpointed issues and solutions was just amazing to see, but even though I was interested I was not able to try it for myself and judge it.
I was able to use Kiro, which is AWS’ take on agentic development, and it was interesting because it had the concept of plan before write, which was cool in order to do as we humans do when developing a thing: understand the issue, design it and at the end implement it. This was nice and it actually helped me to be a better developer, since now I was prompted with a new challenge: do not write all the code, but understand if the plan is fine and also all the steps were fine, in addition to the code developed by the agent.
I was never really into the IDE chatbot plugin, I felt like it was not the way it was intended to work (Claude Code gave me some reason for that thought) and so the CLI was my natural place to use it. Kiro CLI was nice but it did not have the extensions à la Claude Code and I felt like I was missing some of the experience.
Then I tried Claude Code, and the extensions were super cool, it was great having so many available extensions made by the community that really helped customize the harness as I wanted. However, I felt it was a bit slow (another take by Prime here) and then I saw this amazing speech about the creator of the Pi coding agent and I literally fell in love with this agent.
So.. what’s Pi?
Pi is like Claude Code, except you can build it exactly the way you want it. The agent is super slim; it ships almost barebones with just four tools: read, write, edit and bash.
No MCP. No sub-agents. No plan mode. No todo list. Nothing. Niente.
Everything can be added through extensions, which are like the Claude Code plugins that now everyone is familiar with.
You can get them from the extensions’ website or you can build your own extensions.
The nicest thing about it is that the agent knows how it’s made, so it can build pieces that work with it in an easy way; give your preferred clanker2 some time, hit /reload and voilà, you have your shiny new extension that customizes the app exactly how you wanted.
This was what sold me on this tool, and I am still using it right now, with my preferred subscription.
The Opencode Go sub
The subscription is Opencode Go, which, for $10, gives you access to roughly $60 worth of requests on non-frontier models, usually open-weighted, like Deepseek V4, Kimi K2.7-Code, GLM-5.2 and others. I was quite skeptical of those models at first, but when I tried them for my hobbies and my development off-work I had to do a full 180-degree turn. Those models are really amazing, and they solve all my usual needs. I don’t feel the need to use GPT-5.5 Pro or Claude Opus 4.8 (with Fable 5 unavailable at the moment), which everyone on social media seems to think is the only way to go for development — both personal and work-related.
Personally, at 10 bucks a month, if you don’t believe me, I’d still say: give it a try. Actually, the first month is only 5 bucks, so in my opinion it is really worth a try.
This website was made almost entirely with Deepseek V4 Pro and mostly V4 Flash, which is blazing fast and capable of simple requests like building this website or just simple research or brainstorming on various tasks.
Wrapping up
So, sorry for the long post, but I hope to have given you some kind of understanding of why I prefer things that are a bit off the usual route, and also not to trust everything social media is feeding you. Sometimes, the answer arrives only if you try for yourself, and for me, this setup is the setup I’ll stick with for (I hope) a really long time.