· Max Tower · Programming · 2 min read
First Look at Open Code
I took a crack at a simple website with OpenCode + the Big Pickle model
Yesterday, I downloaded OpenCode and asked it to create a queuing sytem to support Youtube karaoke. I called it Toobaroke and you can see the result here.
One big surprise was that this was free to use. Since it’s an open source alternative to Claude Code, I was expecting a bring-your-own-key requirement. Most of the other harnesses I have tried work that way. Surprisngly, Opencode offers several free options, Big Pickle, Minimax 2.5, and Trinity Large. Out of those choices, the Big Pickle sounds most interesting.
I’m not sure how the Pickle stacks up against the latest frontier models, but for the Toobaroke use case it performed well. It was able to implement all the features I asked for, drag and drop, list additions, and Youtube preview. The only thing that fell short was using the same browser window for each new song. Possibly this is a security limitation of the browser.
So where does the Big Pickle come from? It’s likely one of the Chinese Open Weight models run on GPUs by Open Code. Dax, one of the opencode developers mentions self hosting it on Twitter.
For the 3 people on the internet who may be interested in Toobaroke, this is my attempt to make a Youtube karaoke night a little easier to manage by wrapping videos from Youtube links in a queuing system. If you try it out, the video IDs are just the Youtube IDs (?v=) which appear in Youtube links like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpXx5aUkpmITo use Toobaroke, here’s the steps:
- Collect the video IDs from Youtube for videos you want
- Order the list of singers and songs
- When a song is at the top of the Queue, you can click the Youtube play button to open a new window for display on a second screen.
- When the song is finished, click the remove button next to the song info and it will shift over to the Played section.
