I've been using Claude and Chat GPT for about two years, but I'm not a hardcore open‑software fan. Just now I got opencode running on my own inference endpoint and it felt surprisingly good—freeing, in a way. I own the endpoint, so my data just travels from my laptop to there and back, making it feel truly mine.

The motivation was simple: I got home, wanted a side project, and my personal Claude or Chat GPT plan wasn't ideal. I work at Modal, and yesterday we launched Kimi K3 on managed endpoints. Instead of upgrading my Claude plan, I wanted to try it out on my own, even though I didn't contribute to the feature yet.

Within about 5 minutes I had opencode pointed at my own Modal endpoint and running. Spinning it up felt like opening vim after spending a long time in a fancy editor—those ties to other providers were cut, and I could breathe freely. It's dramatic, but not exaggerated; it's just unexpectedly satisfying.