OpenCode: An Open Source AI Coding Agent You Can Install in One Curl Command
No account, no signup, just a single terminal command and you're off.
There's a new open source project called OpenCode that's trying to make AI-assisted coding actually feel lightweight. Instead of another SaaS platform with onboarding flows and API keys, this thing lives in your terminal. One curl command, and you get a coding agent that can read files, write code, run tests, and iterate on problems.
It's from the team at AnomalyCo, and they've put it up on GitHub for anyone to try. Let's look at what it actually does, and why you might care.
What It Does
OpenCode is a terminal-based AI coding agent. You give it a task (like "add a rate limiter to this API endpoint" or "find and fix the bug in the test suite"), and it works through the problem step-by-step. It reads your project files, makes changes, runs commands, checks the results, and adjusts if something breaks.
It's not a wrapper around a chat interface. It's an agent that operates on your actual codebase, right from the shell.
The core loop is pretty straightforward:
- You describe what you want
- The agent plans out actions
- It edits files, runs tests, checks outputs
- If something fails, it retries with a different approach
Why It's Cool
A few things stand out compared to other AI coding tools:
No cloud dependency. You run it locally. No sending your entire codebase to a third party API. It uses open source models under the hood (like CodeLlama and others), so the code stays on your machine.
The one-curl install. curl -sSL https://opencode.sh | bash and you're done. No npm init, no pip install, no docker pull. It's refreshingly simple.
Works with your existing tools. It reads your git history, lints your code, runs your test framework. It's not opinionated about your stack. You can point it at Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust, whatever.
Fails gracefully. When the agent makes a mistake (and it will), it rolls back changes properly. It commits to git before each change so you can review the diff or revert.
Self-contained. The binary is under 20MB. No node_modules, no venv, no container images. Just a single executable.
How to Try It
Open your terminal and run:
curl -sSL https://opencode.sh | bash
That downloads a binary for your platform and runs the setup. After that, you can start a session with:
opencode "add error handling to the file upload function"
Or point it at a specific file:
opencode "find and fix the bug in src/auth.js"
The project README on GitHub has more examples, including how to configure it for different models and how to use it in CI pipelines.
If you want to build from source or contribute, the repo is at: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode
Final Thoughts
This isn't going to replace your IDE or your debugging skills. But it's a genuinely useful tool for specific workflows: quick refactors, boilerplate generation, test fixing, or exploring a codebase you haven't touched in months.
The fact that it's open source and installs in one command makes it easy to try without committing to yet another toolchain. I can see myself using this for those "I know what I want, but I'm too lazy to type it out" moments, or for getting past a syntax error in a language I haven't used in a while.
Give it a shot. Worst case, you're out one curl command.
Follow more open source projects like this at @githubprojects