The 157K Signal You Shouldn't Ignore The figure being cited — 157,000 developers adopting OpenCode — is the kind of number that's easy to dismiss as social media optics. It isn't. Claude Code, Anthropic's official CLI, sits on a fundamentally different distribution model: closed binary, single-vendor model routing, billing through your Anthropic account. The fact that a self-funded open-source project crossed six figures of adoption while a polished managed product was already available tells you something specific about what working developers are optimizing for: they want a harness they can keep running if Anthropic raises prices, changes terms, or deprecates a model they depend on. The terminal-based AI coding category went from one credible entrant to a fractured landscape in roughly 18 months. OpenCode, Aider, Continue, and a handful of others all run the same basic loop: take a prompt, plan, edit files, run shell commands, repeat. What differs is who controls the loop.…