Link: Building OpenCode with Dax Raad via The Pragmatic Engineer
After a surge in usage of OpenCode, Dax Raad discusses how he and his team are building a developer tool at Anomaly Innovations Inc on the The Pragmatic Engineer podcast with Gergely Orosz. He discusses being in the process of competing with coding agent companies, responding to user feedback, and leading his team to write quality software.
For OpenCode, product positioning beats speed of execution. A massive reason for OpenCode becoming the most popular open source AI coding harness is that they noticed no coding agent had successfully claimed the open source category. Dax was wondering why not, given that every market-leading dev tool across the industry is open source. So, he and the team focused on positioning and it paid off handsomely. He summarizes: “Get positioning right and the world just keeps handing you wins you didn’t expect.”
OpenCode’s “inverted” strategy: start with a good-enough product, then optimize. Dax admits their harness wasn’t ideal during OpenCode’s first five months, but it was still good enough. “Once we won enough market share, we went back and tried to make our harness good and smart.”
Motivated engineers who care about quality get buried by slop PRs from devs who don’t care. Dax has hired people from companies where they were one of the few who still cared about quality. In contrast, former colleagues just pumped out AI-generated code and focused on getting their tasks done, ignorant of the decreasing quality of code. Motivated devs feel they are drowning in garbage code and tech debt, and getting burnt out by trying to clean it up. Dax calls this an engineering leadership problem that most companies don’t notice.
Old “enterprise” patterns are coming back in fashion for writing quality software, as agents are the new junior engineers. Dax says that things like domain-driven design and verbose design patterns went out of style over the past two decades because they’re tedious to type out. But they are actually very useful when there are junior devs on the team – or when there are agents that need strong guardrails. Dax is already using more such “old school” patterns.