Using an open model feels surprisingly good

July 27, 2026

I’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT like the next guy for probably two years now. I’ve never been a huge “open software” nerd or anything like that. But just now, I got opencode working on my own inference endpoint and… it felt surprisingly good. It feels… freeing, somehow. I own the endpoint, and my data just goes from my laptop to there and back. It feels like it’s mine. It’s really nice.

The motivation for this was that I just got home and wanted to start on a little side project, but I don’t have the best Claude or ChatGPT plan for my personal account. I work at Modal, and today we just launched Kimi K3 on managed endpoints, and I know Kimi K3 is supposed to be pretty solid, so instead of upgrading my Claude plan, I wanted to give it a try. (I didn’t directly contribute to this feature, so I haven’t gotten to play with it yet.)

Within about 5 minutes, I had opencode pointed at my own Modal endpoint and running. Spinning up opencode, I just felt a nice, empty blankness. The best way I can describe it is like opening vim after spinning a bunch of time in a big fancy editor. Or maybe like the tendrils tying me to other providers had been cut, and I could breathe freely. I’m being somewhat dramatic here but not exaggerating that much. It’s weird, lol, and unexpected to me, which is why I wanted to write about it.