Ask HN: Claude Code Alternative
Claude Code with Opus and the Max plan is fine for me, even though I'm not super happy about moments when it's not available, the costs, account banning, etc.
Anyway, what I am looking for and am curious about is if there is a solution that I am overlooking that will work the same, or almost the same or better, but at a cheaper price.
I read about people being happy about pi.dev and OpenCode. I tried OpenCode with Mimo V2 pro and it is pretty good. I previously used Qwen CLI before they stopped the free usage, and Gemini CLI. I also used Z.ai with OpenCode.
I read about people using Opus for planning and then for non-important stuff moving the agent to use a further cheaper model. I am not into usage-based pricing unless it will be cheaper nonetheless (I doubt it though).
Do you have some cool setups to share? I usually do Python for backend and TypeScript frontend. What exactly are you using it for? Is it economically valuable? I've recently come to the conclusion that even spending $100/mo on AI is basically peanuts for what we get out of it, and moved a lot of what I do to Opus in Cursor (despite the cost) over and above Claude Code because, despite costing 5x the price, it's more thorough. Mistral Codestral [1] The Mistral Studio product is currently free to use. Le Chat Pro costs €18/month. [2] Either API keys will work with Vibe CLI. Are you using Mistral? Is it good? I wasn't able to find benchmark comparisons with Opus I like it, but I haven't used Opus so it's hard to compare. From the benchmarks I've seen, Mistral's offerings are right up there with other open source options, but not quite at the frontier with closed source models. I am a little skeptical about pi.dev's super simple, bare bones architecture. But it does seem to be getting a lot of attention so maybe I should check it out. OpenCode is good IMHO but if you are just sticking with Opus on Max, Claude Code is finetuned for it, so would suggest sticking with it. Codex