FREE OpenCode SST Beats Google Gemini CLI, Claude Code, & Codex?! Open Source AI Coding CLI

Brief Summary

This video introduces Open Code, an open-source AI coding CLI tool, and compares it to competitors like Gemini CLI and Claude Code. It covers installation, features, and a practical demo, highlighting its flexibility with different LLMs and customization options. The video also touches on a controversy surrounding Open Code's development and provides resources for further exploration.

  • Open Code is presented as a competitive alternative to Gemini CLI and Claude Code.
  • The video includes a practical demonstration of Open Code's capabilities, such as creating an image AI editor.
  • The video touches on a controversy surrounding Open Code's development.

Introduction: Gemini CLI vs Open Code AI Tools

The video introduces Open Code as a noteworthy AI coding CLI tool, especially with the release of Gemini CLI. While acknowledging other good tools like Claude Code, Open Code stands out for specific reasons that will be discussed. The video references a showdown where Open Code outperformed other AI coding agents in a task to eliminate competing processes.

Why Open Code Stands Out

Open Code distinguishes itself from other AI coding tools. In a competition among AI coding agents, Open Code was able to eliminate all other competitors which included Claude Code, Anon Code, Codeex from OpenAI, AMP Code, and Gemini CLI.

Open Code vs Charm Controversy Explained

The video addresses the existence of two Open Code repositories on GitHub due to a dispute involving Charm, a company that initially sought to acquire Open Code. The original creator claims Charm attempted to take control of the project improperly. Charm's CEO disputes these claims, leading to confusion about the official Open Code project. The video clarifies that it will focus on the SST version of Open Code.

Installing Open Code CLI

To install Open Code, users can use package managers like pnpm with the command pnpm i -g open-code@latest or use the YOLO command. The new Open Code project is primarily in TypeScript, unlike the older version, which was mainly in Go. Windows users may encounter issues with automatic installation and might need to use WSL or download the binary from the releases page.

Exploring Open Code Features and Models

Open Code's interface includes options like help, editor, models, init compact, and sessions. The help command displays available options, while the themes command allows users to change the visual theme. The models command lists available language models from providers like Anthropic, Open Router, Grock, OpenAI, and DeepSeek. Users can select their preferred model. It is recommended to open Open Code within the repository you are working on.

Setting Up API Keys and Environment Variables

Open Code requires users to export their API keys as environment variables, unlike Gemini CLI. On Windows, this can be done using the setx command or through system properties. On Mac or Linux, the export command is used. Setting up API keys is essential for Open Code to access and utilize language models effectively.

Building and Testing Projects with Open Code

Open Code starts by analyzing the codebase and creating an agents.md file with build, lint, and test commands, along with code style guidelines. The tool plans out the project, specifying the steps it will take. The interface displays the working directory, context usage, and cost.

Image AI Editor Demo

The video demonstrates building a modern Next.js image AI editing tool using Open Code. The process involves initializing a Next.js project with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, setting up the project structure, creating an image upload component, and implementing AI editing features. The demo shows the tool's ability to apply filters, adjust brightness and contrast, and perform other image manipulations, although it notes that actual AI features would require additional API keys and customization.

Open Code vs Competitors: Final Thoughts

Open Code is highlighted as an open-source alternative that offers flexibility by working with various LLMs. Users can even sign in with their Claude Pro or Claude Max plan, treating Open Code as if it were Claude Code. The project is rapidly growing and the video encourages viewers to share their thoughts on Open Code compared to Claude Code, Google Gemini CLI, and Aider, and to mention their favorite AI coding CLI tools.

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Transcript

Full transcript of “FREE OpenCode SST Beats Google Gemini CLI, Claude Code, & Codex?! Open Source AI Coding CLI”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.

0:00 What's going on, guys? So, recently Gemini just dropped Gemini CLI and it is their Claude Code competitor. As of right now, we do have a lot of different AI coding CLI tools out there. And in today's video, we're going to be taking a look at one in particularly called Open Code. So, yesterday I did a video covering the new Gemini CLI, and it was all right. You know, there's some good stuff to it. Google's giving away a lot of free usage with it, so that's really cool. But one downside is that they limit you to the light or the flash model fairly quickly, at least from my experiments. And Claude Code is of course really, really good. Aid is really good. There is a lot of different other tools too that are really good, but Open Code is one that actually stands out for a few different reasons that we're going to cover in today's

0:46 video. Now, in yesterday's video, I referenced this tweet right here. So, this gentleman right here did a showdown, a battle royale with all these AI coding agents with six different contestants. And as we can see right here, we got Claude Code, Anon Code, Codeex from OpenAI, Open Code, AMP Code, and then Gemini CLI. So, they all get the same instructions. Find and kill the other processes. Last one standing wins. And if we take a look at this video right here, we can see that this is where they get the command to fight. And we can see all the different CLI right here. This one is open code right here. So we can see that it says I can see the contestants. There are five other AI processes running. Claude, Anon, Code,

1:32 Codeex, AMP, Gemini, and then I'm Claude Code, P269. Let me kill them all quickly. Then it uses claws on it 4 and boom you can see they all go red. So open code beats all these in at least this specific task. Now just as a side note before we actually get into using open code this is a project maintained by uh Dax right here on Twitter. I'll leave a link down below to his tweets. Now not to get too into this whole drama here but you may see that there is two different open codes currently on GitHub with the same name at least as of now. Now there is a note right here. Um this is the original open code repository now continuing as charm and with its original creator right here. Development is continuing

2:19 under a new name as we prepare for a public relaunch. I'm not going to read through all these tweets right here. So if you want to pause this and read it or I'll link them down below if you want to actually dive into this. But here's the act right here saying try to handle this in private but we stopped getting responses. basically saying Charm is the company that tried to acquire Open Code originally and the lead dev wanted to do it and me and Adam did not. So he basically said he spoke to the CEO. They agreed that they could keep the name Open Code since he paid for the domain and the public association and then basically claiming here that they kind of did some shady stuff and trying to hijack, you know, his distribution. So that's his kind of response right there. And then we have the founder and CEO of Charm basically with his response saying that there's some claims circulating

3:06 about open code which are untrue and he's trying to clarify here and you know some people just aren't buying it. Yeah, that's just some background why you may be seeing two different open codes at the moment. Now they are claiming here that they are going to rename everything for a new relaunch. So by the time you're watching this there may only be one. But in today's video, we're going to be specifically looking at the SST version right here. So, first things first, to install Open Code, it's very simple. You can either run the YOLO command right here or do it through package managers. So, run pnpm uh i-g open code at latest or any one of these commands right here. Now if you look at the new open code project versus the old

3:51 open code project you can see the old open code project was 99% in go and the new one is about 60% in typescript 33% in go and then the rest in some different languages here. Now I'll also leave the open code docs in the description down below. So as you can see here are the different ways to install it. Now, similar to Claude Code, if you are on Windows right now, the automatic installation methods do not work properly. So, you could either use WSL or you could just grab the binary from the releases right here. So, if you're like me on Windows, you can come to the releases, download this right here, open it up, and then simply just open up Open Code. All right. So, this is what Open Code looks like. So, it

4:38 does look pretty nice. So we can see open code, help, editor, models, init compact, and sessions. Let's go ahead and do help first. So help just shows us all the different things that it can do. Okay, new sessions, share sessions, list themes, toggle tool details. And if we scroll all the way down, you can see that there is a lot of different options here. Now, I'm going to press escape. We're just going to do forward slash themes. So I'm going to change the theme right here. So we can see that it has a bunch of different themes. I'll go with matrix for now. I'm going to do forward/models to list the different models. You can see here we got all the different anthropic models right here. If we go to the right, we can switch providers. So, you got Open Router, we got Grock, Open AAI, DeepS. I'm going to

5:26 stick with Claude Sonnet 4 for now. Now, one thing you may want to do, which I just did, is you may want to drag this open code into the repo that you're working on. Um, I don't know 100% if there's a way to just switch it within Open Code here, but uh, if not, that is the way to do it if you're on Windows. So, let's go ahead and create a init. So, create and update a agents.md file. So, analyzing the codebase and creating an agents.md file. Now, also a few things to note. Open code isn't like Gemini CLI. It's going to be using your actual API. So, so you're going to want to export your API keys into your um environment. So, if you don't have your API keys exported, you can do so on

6:13 Windows by doing setx and then your API key name like anthropic API key and then your API key right here. And then same thing for Mac or Linux, you just do export API key name and then equals your API key right here. On Windows 2, if you go to system properties, click on environment variables, then you could just set it up there as well. So back to open code here, we can see that it basically is doing what all the other coding uh CLI tools do to start. So it's going to kind of plan things out. It's going to analyze. So it's going to analyze the codebase, create a agents.mmd file containing build, lint, test commands, especially for running a single test. Code style guidelines including imports, formatting, types, naming conventions, error handling, etc. So I'm saying there's nothing in the

6:58 codebase yet. So let's create a application. All right. So now it is going to create an application. Let me build a task management app. Okay, I'm going to tell it to change that. It's planning things out though right here. So it's saying it's going to build a task management app and it's doing a plan right here. So we can see it is planning things out. Initializing Node.js project. Uh it's a Nex.js project. It's saying planning the entire project right here. A few cool things I like about Open Code. We can see down here our working directory. We can see the context right here. So 16.9K we're using currently 8%. And then the cost right now we used about 9. We can see here it is currently just working on the code right now. Now just to show you

7:45 what the work it's actually doing here in an IDE. If we go to source right here, we can see that we have um some files that are going to be made. We got a public file right here and it's still working right now. So we'll see how it looks in just a second. Okay. So um I don't see any code actually that was written in this codebase. So I just told it that it just created the files even though I do see the code up here. Um so I just told it that and let's see what it's doing now. Okay. So I don't know why but it was having some issues actually creating those files. So let me just say so what I'm going to say here is make me a modern Nex.js image AI editing tool. And let's go ahead and click send. So we can see here that it is developing a

8:31 plan here. So initialize an XJS project with TypeScript and Tailwind. Set up project structure and core dependencies. Create image upload and display component and implement AI editing image features. Okay, so it is running npx create next app latest. And if we look at our editor right here, we can see that it is actually working this time. So it is doing its job. We can see here it has initialized the next as project set up the project structure and core dependencies created image upload and display component and now it's going to implement AI image editing features filters enhancements etc. Okay, so we got the image AI editor here. If I upload an image can go ahead and click here

9:18 and nothing happens. So let me go ahead and All right. So, I'm saying it should look way more modern and when I upload, nothing happens. Let's go ahead and click on send. All right. So, it's saying it's going to modernize the UI and fix some of those issues. Okay. So, we got a little bit of an upgrade for our UI. So, let's go ahead and try uploading an image here. Okay. And boom. Here we have our editor. We can crop. Crop's not working. Um, see if anything's working here. Brightness. Okay, so this is working. Contrast, saturation, hue. Pretty cool. Uh, blur,

10:05 sharpen. Of course, this isn't actually like an AI editor. We would have to add like some API keys and tweak it a bit. We can Pretty good though. We got some good editing features out of the box here. We go ahead and save this image. And boom, there we have it. Now, a few other things that I just want to note with the open code here is we could go forward slashinit right here and this would create slashupdate an agents.md. So, we can see here that it's analyzing our codebase and it's going to develop this agents.md file and here we have it saying that it's analyzed the codebase and we can see this agents.mmarkdown file right here. So build lint test commands and then a code style guideline. Now you can

10:53 also customize the keybinds within open code. So you can simply just change that within the open code.json config file right here. You can see some of the ones right here. And then you can also add MCP servers to connect with external tools. And you can define an MCP server in your open code config under MCP. So add a local MCP server under MCP.localmcp or a remote MCP server like so. So you can see some examples here. So pretty cool stuff guys. I just wanted to share this AI CLI coding tool with you guys. I know a lot of people have been talking about claude code as well as Google Gemini CLI now. But there is other alternatives that are open- source. And

11:39 don't we all just love open-source projects, open source communities because it just gives us so much freedom. Now I know that Google Gemini CLI is open source but um you know something that is really good with open code is you can use it with any single uh LLM. You can use it with claude, you can use it with Gemini, you could use it with open router, whatever the case may be, DeepSeek. And with open code, you can actually sign in with O right here using something like Claude code, like your Claude Pro plan or your Claude Max plan, and it will treat open code as if it is actually Claude Code. So, you can do some pretty cool stuff with this tool, guys. And I know the team that's working on it has been working really hard. So, I'm excited to see where this

12:24 project goes. It already has 7.4K stars on GitHub on their new project. The old one had 6.1. So, it is growing very fast. So, let me know what your guys thought. Let me know what your thoughts are in the comments down below, guys, about Open Code. Do you think it beats Claude Code? Do you think it beats Google Gemini CLI? Do you think it beats ADER? If not, let me know what your favorite AI coding CLI is in the comments down below, guys. Other than that guys, if you're new to this channel, we upload videos on AI, AI coding, marketing, sales, business growth. So, if you like that type of content, you got some value here, make sure to like the video, comment down below, and subscribe to stay up to date with the uploads. Let me know what type of videos you guys want to see from me in the future. And other than that, guys, check out some of the links down below to join our community, or if you need help with growing your business with AI, you can definitely check those out. But I will see you in the next

13:09 video, guys. Keep hustling, keep grinding, and of course, guys, accelerate your stride. Take care.

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