Most people RENT their AI coding agent without realizing it: a monthly bill, a vendor that picks which model you're allowed to use, your config and history on someone else's servers — and the day you stop paying, it's gone. OpenCode (free, open-source, MIT, ~180,000 GitHub stars, built by Anomaly — formerly SST) is the one you OWN: a terminal-first agent that points at ANY model — Claude, GPT, Gemini, or one running locally on your own machine. This playbook is the whole map: install it, the model-swap setup, the rent-vs-own decision rubric, the honest caveats, and a first-run checklist.

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Here's the tell almost nobody notices: Cursor and Claude Code are brilliant, but you rent them. You pay every month, the company decides your model, your history and config live on their terms, and switching means relearning everything. OpenCode flips that. It's a free, open-source (MIT) AI coding agent at roughly 180,000 GitHub stars — built by the team now called Anomaly (you may know them as SST) — and it's designed around ownership. Three things make it different: it's model-agnostic (point it at Claude, GPT, Gemini, or a model running locally via Ollama/llama.cpp — your choice, not theirs); it runs as a local server with many front-ends (terminal, desktop app, your editor, even CI, all talking to one engine); and it pulls real language-server diagnostics into the loop so it catches the type errors a model alone would miss. Run /init and it writes an AGENTS.md project-memory file. The signature move — the thing no rented agent can do — is swapping the model behind the SAME agent: run a frontier model for the hard, high-stakes work, a cheap open-weight model for everyday volume (shockingly close for a fraction of the cost), or a fully local model for private code and zero token cost. That's a quality-vs-cost-vs-privacy dial Cursor and Claude Code can't give you, because the model IS the product they sell. This 6-page playbook covers it honestly: the rent-vs-own breakdown, the ~30-second install (curl -fsSL https://opencode.ai/install | bash, or npm/Homebrew) and first run (/connect, /init, Tab to switch build and read-only plan mode), the model-swap setup, a rent-vs-own decision rubric (pick OpenCode if you live in the terminal and want control; pick Cursor for the gentlest beginner GUI; pick Claude Code for the most polished agent), and the caveats the install tutorials skip: 'free' has an asterisk (you pay tokens via your own keys unless you run local), it's not always faster (one benchmark put it well behind Claude Code on speed, partly because of its thorough LSP loop), it moves fast and breaks things (thousands of open issues, several releases a week), and it had a real security hole — CVE-2026-22812, where a background server could let a website run shell commands on your machine, now patched in v1.0.216 with the server off by default. Owning an agent is a responsibility, not just a flex: keep it updated and use plan mode before letting it edit. Stop renting your tools — start owning them.

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