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OpenCode, the open-source coding agent with 214,000 stars and nearly 30,000 forks, has shipped a stable 2.0 after three months of beta. The release makes 2.x the mainline version and pushes several sweeping changes. The headline, though, is also the bad news: plugins written for OpenCode 1.0 do not run on 2.0, and integrations built on the old server API have to be updated. This is not a tweak you can adapt in a few minutes. The entire interface and configuration logic has been swapped out. ...

Earlier posts in this set covered the companion models on OpenCode Zen: North Mini Code for light and fast work, MiMo V2.5 for multimodal input, DeepSeek V4 Flash as the all-rounder, and Big Pickle for refactoring experts. Today is the heavy-duty one: Nemotron 3 Ultra Free, NVIDIA’s model, and the one to reach for with algorithm, math, scientific, and machine learning work. What Nemotron 3 Ultra Free is Nemotron is NVIDIA’s open-source large-model family, built around scientific computation, mathematical reasoning, and hard technical problems. ...

OpenCode Zen bundles a set of small, fast coding models alongside the flagships. In the lineup that shipped in mid-2026, the lightest one used to be North Mini Code Free, positioned as the everyday assistant: a small model that answers in seconds and behaves predictably. This guide keeps the same shape for that model, with a note up front that matters if you read it later. As of October 2026, North Mini Code Free no longer appears in Zen’s current model catalog. Free lineups rotate, and Zen’s list has since picked up other lightweight free options such as Ling 2.5 Preview Free. Read the model lineup section below as a template, then apply it to whichever small free model Zen lists today. ...

The previous post in this set covered a reliable everyday coding helper. MiMo V2.5 Free is the other side of the lineup: not a mechanic but a versatile artist, and its signature is multimodal input. It reads both text and images, which is rare among the free options on OpenCode Zen. MiMo stands for Multi-Modal, and V2.5 is the current release in Zen’s catalog under the free tier. Model id mimo-v2.5-free, served through the OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions endpoint, and priced at $0 for input, output, and cached reads for a limited time. Free-period terms matter here: like Big Pickle, MiMo V2.5 Free is a model whose collected data may be used for improvement during the free window. Keep confidential code out of it. ...

The earlier entries in this series covered North Mini Code Free, a reliable everyday coding helper, and MiMo V2.5 Free, a strong multimodal option. This one is about DeepSeek V4 Flash, the model that does the most things well across OpenCode Zen’s low-cost lineup. If you only want to configure one model and stop thinking about it, this is the one. DeepSeek is one of China’s leading model labs, and V4 Flash is its high-speed tier. On OpenCode Zen it is listed at $0.14 per 1M input tokens and $0.28 per 1M output tokens, among the cheapest models Zen serves. Free access has appeared through limited-time promotions, so check the current offer before assuming it is free. ...

In the last two months, three hosted AI assistants arrived from big labs in quick succession. xAI launched the Grok Bot beta on August 11. Meta launched Muse on September 8, and per Sensor Tower’s estimate it reached about 5 million downloads in 22 days, more than twice as fast as ChatGPT reached that figure. OpenAI announced dots at DevDay on September 29. Add the open-source OpenClaw, which caught on in developer circles earlier in the year, and Nous Research’s Hermes Agent, and the always-on assistant race now has serious entrants from every direction. ...

OpenCode Zen lists around a dozen models as free for a limited time. Big Pickle is one of them, and it is the one to reach for when a task is about reading code rather than writing new code: legacy refactors, slow queries, unfamiliar codebases. Two facts from the official Zen docs before anything else. Big Pickle has a 200,000-token context window with 32,000 max output tokens, and it is free on input, output, and cached reads. Its model id is big-pickle, available in OpenCode as opencode/big-pickle. It is a stealth model, so the lab behind it is not disclosed. OpenCode’s privacy page lists Big Pickle as one of the exceptions to the zero-retention policy: during the free period, collected data may be used to improve the model. Keep proprietary code out of it. ...

Pi is the coding agent called Pi, from the github.com/earendil-works/pi repository. It crossed 112K stars with 14.2K forks on GitHub, and it is the agent underneath OpenClaw, the viral coding agent that ships as ClawdBot and MoltBot. Version 0.87.1 is current as of September 22, 2026. Pi calls itself a minimal, extensible agent harness. It ships powerful defaults and deliberately skips sub-agents and plan mode - you add those through extensions and packages when you need them. ...

Manus 2.0 launched September 28, 2026. It is not a version bump. Manus describes it as a new architecture with a new agent harness named Cascade, a purchasable Cloud Computer, event-driven Automations, an upgraded desktop Studio, and a separate app for personal agents called Cue. Manus is a hosted product. There is no server to provision and no package manager install for the agent itself. “Installation” means getting the apps, authorizing Remote Control and Computer Use, and, for developers, creating an API key and installing the official skill in a coding agent. Each path is covered below. ...

Laya is the open-weights decision engine from Convai Innovations, version 0.3.20 on PyPI under Apache 2.0. It answers typed questions (choice, score, noul) in a single forward pass on your own machine - no API key, no vendor lock-in. This guide installs it on Ubuntu 24.04 with a script that was tested end-to-end in a clean Docker container before publishing. Everything the script does follows the official install path: a dedicated venv, CPU-only PyTorch from the PyTorch index (avoids the multi-GB CUDA bundles that pip install laya drags in by default), then laya from PyPI. ...