Anthropic's decision to restrict Claude Max Plan to Claude Code CLI today felt like a broken promise, a bridge too far after months of silent breaking changes to Claude Code.
I'm sick and tired of rug pulls and vendor lock-in. That's why I'm going all in on OpenCode Zen. Zen picks the best provider for any given model automatically, similar to OpenRouter but opinionated about the "best" model providers.
Pair that with the OpenCode CLI, and you have a match made in heaven.
Why not Claude Code
I was an early adopter of Claude Code. It quite simply blew me away, and the introduction of the Max Plan changed the industry forever.
But Claude Code's iterations over time left me frustrated. Features I'd spent hours setting up would be deprecated or have silent API changes. Out of the blue our plan usage windows changed. Overall it felt like Anthropic didn't really know where to take Claude Code, and we were just guinea pigs along for the ride until they landed on a sustainable model. It felt like working inside someone else's Nvim config.
I want my tools to help me get my job done and then get out of the way. If every time I boot them up I have 12 new behaviors to learn (or worse yet re-learn) I'm not working anymore, I'm playing.
Claude Code just didn't put me in the "pit of success" anymore.
Why OpenCode is special
Simply put, open source.
Not only are its maintainers some of the best operators in the business, but OpenCode also has a vibrant community of contributors working to make it better. Thousands of minds working towards a shared goal.
Building in public also means OpenCode can't hide from its audience. What it's building, why it's building it, and when it's coming are open secrets. A great example is copy paste. It just didn't have it for what felt like months. But Adam was open about why, what else was taking priority, and how they would wait to ship it when they felt they got it right. And they nailed it! Who knew that copy-on-select would become one of the little idiosyncrasies I love most about OpenCode.
Most of all, OpenCode puts me in the pit of success. It never leaves me wondering why an output crashed halfway through, why my deny list is suddenly broken, or my custom tool isn't working. I can (and have) clone the repo and customize it to create my own custom headless Agents. All without really breaking a sweat, thanks to their very Agent friendly docs.
Alternatives
OpenRouter is a fantastic tool but I want my coding agents to "just work", it makes me think too hard about what provider is or isn't being used.
I could of course bring my own API keys for OpenAI and Anthropic, but then I'm locked into their pricing and models.
Zen just takes care of it. It gives me the flexibility to use any model, old or new. Billing takes 5 seconds. Setting spend limits is easy as pie. Oh and did you know they're coming out with a $200 a month use any model plan?
I've been using it since October of 2025, mostly to try out their fun free models. Most recently, I used it to try GLM 4.7 (fantastic and free model right now), and was blown away. Performance was excellent every time, and I don't think I'd be saying the same if I'd used the model with another provider.