Given the prevalence of Opencode and its ability to use any model and provider I don't see reason why would anyone bother with random vendors half-assed tools.
Given the prevalence of Opencode and its ability to use any model and provider I don't see reason why would anyone bother with random vendors half-assed tools.
For starters, money. There is no better value out there that I'm aware of than Claude Code Max. Claude Code also just works way better than Opencode, in my experience. Though I know there are those that have experienced the exact opposite.
I find Claude Code bloated and a bit clunky. Those same Claude models work better in Opencode, where I can also combine them with other providers.
The fact that Anthropic recently started blocking their coding plans usage from other tools is telling. They are in the phase where they realize they can't compete in an open field and need to go back behind their fortress gates and hope to endure a siege from the stronger opponents.
Are you calling OpenAI a random vendor?
That's like calling Coca Cola a random beverage vendor
Yes, OpenAI is a random development tool vendor. In the same way Volkswagen is a random sausage vendor.
Do you drink your Coca Cola directly from the Coca Cola packaged bottle?
Or do you prefer to sip it in the cup of your choice and drink it from there? The same cup you use to drink Pepsi, Fanta, milk, and other beverages.
Ah, got it, you mean in the "development tools" category.
I'd say that such a category, first is very small, and second there's almost no companies that exclusively offer development tools (JetBrains?). It's a product category where the competition is either individuals/OSS/academic or tech companies that as a side quest release their dev tech.
For the even more specific tool of "LLM development tools" or "agentic coding" OpenAI is the first of its kind, the term VibeCoding emerged from a Karpathy tweet one year ago, and back it was just ChatGPT through the Chat Interface.
It wasn't a coincidence either, they explicitly train their models on code production, mainly out of a need to do useful tool calls, and to do even simple tasks like multiplying a couple of numbers, but it grew into its own product category starting with the supervised Cursor,Windsurf, then the autonomous Devin, then back to supervised with Claude Code/Codex
So yeah, I wouldn't say it's a random vendor in that narrow sense of the specific product. But I get that it's a random vendor if you zoom out and think of a "development tools" category. It's subjective, but I think the nascent field that's clearly changing and hitting Trillion dollar market size is a bit more important than a field that only ever ever had a single company at all in that field (JetBrains?).