OpenCode moves millions of programmers and almost nobody asks whose it is

For a while now I've been watching OpenCode pitch itself as the community's open-source tool, the free alternative to the agents from the big players. Its own website talks about millions of developers; coverage like the one in DecisionCrafters puts it at more than 160,000 stars on GitHub, around 900 contributors and 7.5 million programmers a month. The story is the one about the community project that grows on its own.

The part almost nobody puts in the headline was told by TechFundingNews: behind it sits a company, Anomaly, with money from Y Combinator, from Reid Hoffman's fund and from an a16z scout program, among others. It's not a volunteer project; it's a venture-backed company that still hasn't shown how it plans to make money. The "community" label lives side by side with a funding round.

I've tried OpenCode. It's easy, it's clear, and along the way it hides what's really happening to your code: you don't know which model is touching it or what it's doing with it. That I like a good deal less. But what unsettles me most is that underneath it's a house of cards of open-source libraries stacked one on top of another, with joint maintenance that's questionable at best. I don't trust third-party dependencies: they open too many vulnerable fronts that don't depend on you. And if there's a company that has put other people's money into building this, why can't you see the business model? I keep using OpenCode, but it worries me. Time will tell whether my worry was warranted.

Sources: OpenCode · DecisionCrafters · TechFundingNews