An Open Source AI Coding Agent You Can Install With a Single Curl Command
You've probably seen a dozen AI coding tools launch this year, and most of them want your credit card before they'll show you a terminal. What if you could just pipe a script into bash and have a working agent in under a minute? That's the pitch behind OpenCode, an open source AI coding agent that treats installation like it's 2015 again—in the best way.
What It Does
OpenCode is an AI coding agent that runs in your terminal. It's distributed primarily through npm as opencode-ai, but the project also offers a shell installer, a long list of package manager options, and a desktop application currently in beta.
The core idea is straightforward: you get an agent that helps with coding tasks, and you interact with it through a terminal UI (there's a screenshot on the project page if you want to see the interface before committing). The project ships with a proper web presence at opencode.ai, a Discord community, and builds published through GitHub Actions, so it's not a weekend experiment someone abandoned in a gist.
The README is also translated into more than twenty languages—English, Chinese in both simplified and traditional scripts, Korean, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Bosnian, Arabic, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Bengali, Greek, and Vietnamese. That's a signal the maintainers care about reach beyond the usual English-speaking developer audience.
Why It's Cool
The installation story is genuinely refreshing. The README leads with curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/install | bash and labels it, with admirable honesty, as "YOLO." If piping remote scripts into your shell makes you nervous—and it reasonably might—there are about a dozen alternatives. npm, bun, pnpm, yarn, Scoop and Chocolatey on Windows, Homebrew on macOS and Linux, Pacman and the AUR on Arch, mise for any OS, and Nix for people who live in Nix. Whatever your environment, there's probably a path that fits how you already install software.
The Homebrew setup shows attention to detail. Notice there are two Homebrew options: brew install anomalyco/tap/opencode is marked as recommended and always up to date, while brew install opencode uses the official formula, which the README notes is updated less frequently. That's the kind of distinction most projects bury or ignore entirely. Telling users upfront which channel gets faster updates saves everyone a confusing bug report later.
The installer respects your system's conventions. The installation directory follows a clear priority order: $OPENCODE_INSTALL_DIR first for explicit overrides, then $XDG_BIN_DIR for XDG-compliant setups, then $HOME/bin if it exists or can be created, and finally $HOME/.opencode/bin as a fallback. If you've ever had a tool dump binaries somewhere unexpected and break your $PATH, you'll appreciate that this one asks nicely first.
There's a desktop app in beta. If the terminal isn't your thing—or you want to try the agent without committing to a TUI workflow—there are direct downloads for macOS on both Apple Silicon and Intel, Windows, and Linux in .deb, .rpm, and .AppImage formats. Homebrew cask and Scoop are supported too. It's labeled beta, so treat it accordingly, but it's there.
One practical warning worth heeding: the README advises removing versions older than 0.1.x before installing. That's a specific, actionable note—the kind of thing that saves you from a confusing debugging session when an old binary shadows the new one.
How to Try It
The fastest path, if you're comfortable with it:
curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/install | bash
Prefer a package manager? Pick your poison:
npm i -g opencode-ai@latest # or bun/pnpm/yarn
brew install anomalyco/tap/opencode # macOS and Linux (recommended)
scoop install opencode # Windows
choco install opencode # Windows
sudo pacman -S opencode # Arch Linux (Stable)
mise use -g opencode # Any OS
nix run nixpkgs#opencode # or github:anomalyco/opencode for latest dev
Want to control where it lands?
OPENCODE_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/bin curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/install | bash
For the desktop beta, grab a build from the releases page or opencode.ai/download, or use brew install --cask opencode-desktop on macOS, or scoop bucket add extras; scoop install extras/opencode-desktop on Windows.
The full source and documentation live at github.com/anomalyco/opencode.
Final Thoughts
OpenCode is a solid option if you want an AI coding agent without handing over your workflow to a closed platform. The breadth of installation methods is the standout feature here—it meets you wherever your environment already lives rather than demanding you conform to one distribution channel. The beta desktop app is worth watching if terminal interfaces aren't your preference. If you've been curious about AI coding agents but put off by the setup friction, this is about as low a barrier as you'll find.