About this episode
Dax Raad discusses the rapid growth of OpenCode and the implications of AI in software development.
Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. • turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. — OpenCode is one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools around, surging in just a few months from roughly 650,000 monthly active users to nearly 8 million, and almost 1M daily active users. In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, we meet Dax Raad, co-founder of OpenCode, for a discussion about the gaps in developer tooling that led him to build OpenCode, the advantages of open source, and why taste and engineering judgment matter even more as AI becomes a core part of software development. We also cover how OpenCode turned Anthropic’s blocking of integration with Claude Code into a massive growth lever by partnering with OpenAI and other model providers, why GPU demand is becoming a bottleneck everywhere, how come AI coding tools don’t automatically mean engineering teams move faster, and also why Dax is personally skeptical about…
People in this episode
Host: Gergely Orosz
Guest: Dax Raad
Topics covered
- AI developer tools
- open source
- developer tooling
- engineering judgment
- growth strategies
- skepticism towards AI
Keywords
- OpenCode
- AI coding tools
- developer tools
- engineering
- growth
- skepticism
- integration
Sponsors
Antithesis, WorkOS, turbopuffer
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: OpenCode, OpenAI, Anthropic
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