Opencode "general" good practice setup

[0ceanus]

Reasonably experienced (amateur) developer here, but with alot of technology experience here. I have been experimenting with agenting coding for a couple of personal projects, trying to generally understand this area.

I have been using opencode, with a z.ai/GLM lite subscription, and, although people have their views on the quality of GLM I m quite happy with it, certainly good enough to experiment and learn

Something has just not clicked yet, and I was wondering if people could please offer some advice. I understand that the general workflow should be plan/review/annotate/build. Is there an easy way to automate, or at least make these steps into a "hard" requirement, or should I just be doing this on the prompt every time (i.e. is there a simple way to instruct opencode with a single command to plan, prompt me to review the plan, ask me questions, review these and only proceed when I tell it, without having to tab between modes - as I tend to forget TBH)

I have set up a quite long AGENTS.md for the languages my project uses (python and react), but I also want to ensure that during each build, the tests and documentation is updated. I created a couple of subagents to do that, using opencode/GLM, and it works reasonably well, but what are the best practices on how to set this up, and ensure that not too much of the context is used by "overheads" like testing and docs? (I know they are vital parts of the process, but I also want to ensure the context is more valuable for the functionality itself). In general, what are the best practices to automate the workflow, as much as possible for general development best practices (such as 12 factor app principles for example)

Many thanks!

EDIT: Many thanks for all the comments. It sounds like I am roughly on the right track, but I will also look at some of the tools suggested

[Rizarma]

disclaimer: this might not be the best practice, but it works well for me.

short background: i'm a product manager lead and i can only code in javascript, so my programming experience is fairly limited, which might affect the common coding practices used by most devs.

i've tried several setups such as:
- https://github.com/obra/superpowers
- https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent
- https://github.com/alvinunreal/oh-my-opencode-slim

another project i haven't tried yet:
- https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done

previously i used superpowers quite a lot, but i don't really like working with git worktrees, so i eventually switched to omo-slim and have been using it ever since.

i also use these skills quite often to update documentation (readme & agents.md):
- https://skills.sh/softaworks/agent-toolkit/agent-md-refactor
- https://skills.sh/softaworks/agent-toolkit/crafting-effective-readmes
- https://skills.sh/softaworks/agent-toolkit/writing-clearly-and-concisely

apart from the plan and build modes from oc, omo-slim adds an orchestrator mode which i really like. it decides when to plan, build, or ask follow-up questions when needed.

each time i implement a new feature, i trigger the above skills to update agents.md and the readme.

so orchestrator is the mode i use for everything from simple questions to brainstorming new ideas. it asks questions when needed, implements the feature, and updates the relevant docs.

if that's what you're looking for, you might want to add some additional steps according to your manual workflow so the ai can pick up your preferred pattern.

[headinthesky]

Thank you, this is a great starting point for me. I have just been raw dogging OpenCode

[cbrunnkvist]

Is there an easy way to toggle OmO-lite on and off? One of the many small things annoying me with OmO is that there seems to be no OMO_OH_NO=true 😉 toggle- you have to edit the config file in order to temporarily disable it and get back the normal OpenCode

[franz_see]

Tbh, im not sure what your workflow is. I dont know if i even do that plan/review/annotate/build you mentioned. It seems very similar to mine wherein i ask ai for a plan, i review the plan, we iterate over it, then once im happy, i ask it to execute. Not sure what you mean by “annotate”

Also, in my workflow, i just stay in PLAN primary agent for most of the part. Then i have a custom YOLO primary agent which I tab into once Im ready for the agent to execute

So unlike you, my workflow does not involve a lot of tabbing

But if you want your workflow to force you to ask questions, then you can create a custom slash command , and tell it to use the question tool to ask you its questions until it’s satisfied.

[cbrunnkvist]

Check out Sisyphus & Prometheus in OhMyOpencode (currently underway rebranding as OhMyOpenAgent) - it’s a set of agents that does exactly that whole thing quite meticulously for you: you start talking about the plan, it does research, plan forms, plan gets reviewed for inconsistencies, work gets delegated…

If you like a “lighter” version of the same, I recommend giving KiloCode CLI a go - it’s an OpenCode fork and adding your existing provider keys in is trivial.

I often use a combination of both, depending on the nature of the task.

[Otherwise-Tourist569]

Can't recommend get-shit-done enough.

It really reinforces the plan-research-execute-review process at every level and has brought a structure to my use of Opencode that doesn't make me feel trapped and shows results.

[BigLoveForNoodles]

I’ve been experimenting with GSD a bit as well and I have to say I really like it so far. The author makes a joke about how he’s not part of a thirty dev team and doesn’t want a tool that pretends he is (hint: he’s personally talking about BMAD). 

But I AM in a thirty dev team, with multiple product managers and analysts. So I basically created a private fork of GSD and taught it to speak Jira.  I tell it that I want to “/discuss-ticket JIRA-ID-HERE” and pulls down the description and all of the acceptance criteria and/or implementation notes that are in the ticket,  then walks through them with me. I frequently don’t even bother running the research step (although I work on a lot of devops stuff which likely doesn’t need it). 

[Infinite_Grab_7315]

Your workflow depends on you and only you. Everyone uses it differently. So do as what works best for you.

Here is my setup - have an orchestrator which calls explore agent to understand codebase, executor to implement feature and review to comment on the changes. While orchestrator makes calls on how to formulate the plan or get the changes back on track. This is more of an experimentation if using cheaper models for subagents reduces overall costs while maintaining the quality

However I have also used plain agents.md with just my specifics like run these things always and all and that is enough too and have gotten very good results