Master OpenCode in 28 minutes

Most AI coding tools still work like this. One task, one terminal, one conversation at a time. What if I told you you can code much faster because of one bottleneck? And that bottleneck is your attention. Today I'm going to show you how I use Open Code to run multiple AI tasks in parallel, track usage, and stop babysitting terminals. This is a step-by-step tutorial and how I actually use Open Code, a real workflow under real constraints to ship faster without a team. I'm Keith. I built and exited companies, taking one public, and now I help solopreneurs and builders ship faster by turning AI into real systems. I've used pretty much all of the coding tools, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, you name it, I've tried it. They're all good at generating code, none of them solved the thing that was slowing me down, running multiple tasks and knowing what's happening. So, let me show you my old workflow. I'm subscribed to Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI. And I used to open a terminal for each one, but the problem was when I tried to run multiple tasks in three different windows, I don't know which one has failed, which one is done, and most importantly, I don't know how much credit I have left for each one. So, multitasking was a complete nightmare. What really ended up happening was I just had one window and I kept using it until the credits ran out and then I switched to a different one. So, I can only do one task at a time. After I switched to Open Code, it really changed my world because now I can run multiple tasks in parallel and will tell me how much usage I've used, and alert me when a task is done, and I can run multiple models on the same project at the same time. Absolute game-changer. Quick context, what is Open Code? Here you see Open Code is open and I think of it basically as a task orchestration for AI coding. Instead of just one terminal and one task at a time, here you see that I have multiple sessions going on and for each one, I can choose a different model. So, I can choose to run GPT 5.2 Codex for one task, let it run, and I can run another session using Gemini 3 Pro, let that task run as well, and when it's done, it will alert me so I can run four or five different tasks at the same time, and that's what Open Code does. I'm going to go through the step-by-step instructions from installation all the way to very advanced features with Open Code, but it's important to understand some high-level concepts. So, why am I excited about Open Code? It's because previously I was doing sequential one task at a time, and now I can do parallel tasks and run multiple agents coding at the same time. So, my job now isn't to watch AI work. My job now is to intervene when it's only needed. So, what are we covering in this video today? We're going to be covering from installing Open Code as a terminal or downloading the desktop app, and even showing you how the web version works to connecting to all your different AI providers like Gemini, OpenAI, how to choose the free models and your paid models, choosing between build and planning, adding MCP servers, adding agent skills, and how to integrate it with tools like Warp, and finally giving you a live demo of how I use it in my workflows, working on a project that's generating revenue and running multiple tasks. So, the first thing you need to do is go to open code.ai. And the first option I'm going to show you, and the easiest one, is to download the desktop app. So, you can click on download now, and I'm using a Mac app, so I'm going to download Mac OS Silicon. All right, it's downloaded, I double-click on it, and just follow the instructions, and you should be granted with a desktop app like this. All right, the next option is that you can choose extensions, and if you're already using Cursor, Windsurf, or any of the coding IDEs, you just press install, and it'll get installed into those IDEs as well. Very simple. And then you have the option of installing it through the terminal. Now, what's the difference between installing through an extension or downloading the desktop app? Extensions like Cursor give you basically an app with an interface. So, it makes it easier to have visibility, run multiple tasks, gives you alert, gives you gives you a lot more information to work with. But some people prefer terminal because it's very focused, and if you're familiar with terminal commands, it can be faster. I actually like terminal because I found using terminal, for some reason, seems to be faster than using an IDE. And you have all these options like curl, npm, bun, brew, paru. The most straightforward one is actually using this command, the curl command, because it will identify your operating system, and then it will choose the best option to install on your machine. Because if you're using Linux, you might use paru. If you're using Mac OS, you might use brew install. But if you're unsure, just run the curl command. So, open your terminal. So, you can go to terminal and open your terminal, but I use this different tool called Ghostty, same thing. Just type this in, enter, and it will do its magic. So, those are the three options you can use to install Open Code. And there's a hidden option, which is you can run it on the web. So, after you've installed it in the terminal, you just run this command, open code web, copy, and now it runs in my browser. So, you can see that I can run Open Code there. Okay, so why would you want to run a web version [snorts] of Open Code? I think the most useful use case is where you want to run Open Code on one machine, on one particular machine, and you want to access it using a different machine, maybe your mobile phone. And so, you can connect to it, open a browser, and start coding away while the source code of your project is on the computer. A bit of a pro tip on installing the CLI, command line interface, in the terminal is that sometimes you run into trouble. No worries, you can download a tool called warp.dev, and what warp.dev is is an AI agent for the terminal. So, you can just copy and paste your command into warp.dev, and if there's any issues, you can just ask the AI agent to fix it for you, and it will fix all the issues for you and make sure you get installed. And once you have installed, all you need to do is type in open code, and voila, you're inside the terminal and Open Code is running. The first thing I want to show you inside the Open Code app is the settings, because everyone loves dark mode. So, you can come here, go to appearance, and go ahead and set it to dark. You can choose a font. You can also choose a theme, Dracula, Tokyo Night. So, pick whatever you want, and you have the option to turn on agents, permissions, errors, and you can also have a sound effect when your task completes. And you can also add in shortcuts. So, that's the basic settings. Now, I'm going to go through some of the features that Open Code has. Right here, there's three different options you can choose from. There's build and there's plan. And how I use it is that when I'm thinking of adding a new feature, I usually go into plan mode first before I build it. So, then it thinks through the logic and then it builds. Then you can choose your model. Now, it comes with a lot of free models. GLM 4.7 is actually pretty good, and you can do a lot with free models already, but in the end I think paid models are better, and I'd trade money for time any day of the week. Here I've already connected Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. And usually when I'm planning, I would choose Claude, but recently Claude announced they don't support third party, so I do not recommend using Claude with Open Code because you might get banned. So, when I'm planning, Gemini is better at planning, and so I'm going to use the most powerful one, which is Gemini 3 Pro Preview. And then, thinking effort, I can click, and I want to set it on high because I want to think carefully. And then when I'm ready with the plan, I click on build, where it will actually start coding, and I would use either 5.2 or 5.2 Codex. If it's more advanced feature, then I would use Codex, but if it's something simple like adding a button or just fixing a bug, I would choose 5.2, and if that fails, then I would use a higher context one. So, being mindful of my token use. And thinking effort is basically how many tokens you want to cap your request at. This is an interesting button and actually is a very important tool because it shows how much usage you have left. If you're like me and you're on a $20 plan, things run out pretty quickly. But if you're on a $100 plan, it might take you a while to run out, but it's good to see how much context you have left. And another thing I do is sometimes I attach screenshots saying that some certain UI elements are out of place, and I would just screenshot it and attach that and say fix this, or show the AI what's being made. So, those are the options here. I'm going to take a second here to explain my model strategy because I'm subscribed to Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini on a $20 plan. And I like Open Code because it forces you to think about using which AI and which model is most appropriate for your task, right? And I basically use Gemini for high-level planning, and I use OpenAI once the planning is done to execute the code. And depending on the task, if it's complex, I'll use GPT 5.2 code. If it's just like a simple bug fix or moving a button, I'll use a lower model, and I'll set the token limit to a lower rate. So, this is like representing the token usage. So, this is a good thing to just get in the habit of choosing the right model and thinking about how many tokens you need for what task. So, another technique I use to save on my precious tokens is that, let's say I have three features, instead of making a one long continuous chat one after another, which consumes a lot of tokens, I split them up into new sessions each one, so then it saves me money and context as well. So, little trick that I use to save tokens. Open code comes with all these free options, but if you want to be like me and connect to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, you need to connect to your provider. I'm going to show you how to connect to different AI models in the Open Code desktop app. You click slash and then you go to model and then on the top right, you can click on connect provider and then you just choose the provider that you want, let's say Google, and then you'll need to enter your API key. I'm also going to show you how you can add models if you're using the TUI terminal app, and then I'll go into how you can actually get the API key easily with the help of AI agent without spending like 10 minutes clicking around. Here I've opened my terminal and here I can type in slash, go down, and choose select. And then you can see that I've connected to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, but there's so many options here. This is the only tool where I've seen you can basically connect to everything that is out there and I wouldn't underestimate the Chinese AIs because right now in sixth place and seventh place, you have GLM 4.7, which is open source, and MiniMax, which is also open source, that's beating ChatGPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Flash. So, you can get pretty good results with these other options as well and it's much cheaper to subscribe to them. So, let's click on one of them. I have Perplexity, so let's click on Perplexity and then you enter your API key. And how do you do that? Well, I use a browser called Perplexity Comment. And what I can do is I can come here on the top right, assistant and the AI agent will actually click around the interface and find the API key for me. So, saving you time from clicking and trying to find all these API keys for Google or ChatGPT. Just quick note that you never want to pass your API keys or passwords into AI. And so, this hack to do this is I need to create an API key for Open Code from Perplexity. Can you set up the API key so that it goes up to the stage where the key is ready for me to manually copy and paste. Please do not copy and paste it for me. So, right now I've given instructions to basically set up the API key, but don't copy it. Stop there and then I'll manually copy and paste it into Open Code. And now it should save you a ton of time in clicking around on the interface. Okay, now it's done. I'm going to copy and paste. Okay, and now it's connected and I can choose which one and then now I should be able to go in Perplexity and I can choose sonar sonar pro reasoning. So, it's connected. So, that's how you connect your different AI providers to Open Code. Now, I'm going to actually show you how I actually use Open Code. When you first come in, you got to open a project. If you're starting a new project, then you got to create a new folder and so, I'm going to open a project and here I've opened my project. To give you some context, I have an app here which is a health data analyzer app where you sync your health data and it gives you analysis and you can do AI analysis of your health data as well. So, here you can see that I've got an issue here with this not displaying correctly, so let's take a screenshot and we'll use that in a bit. And now that I've connected, I want to first fix that bug. I'm going to attach the screenshot and say, "For the graphs, the time frame word is out of place. Can you fix it?" And then I can click send, so it's using the attach image function and I've chosen my model. >> [panting] >> While that is running, this will display and it's doing its magic. I'm going to start a new session. I'm going to plan and I'm going to choose Gemini, which is different model and say, "For my health analyzer app, I want to add some gamification ideas to the product so it makes it more sticky. Maybe adding streaks or something, but the end idea is to make sure people sync their data on a regular basis and kind of reward them for the when they actually do sync their data. So, I'm going to let it plan, hit enter, and you can see here that this is running and also my other session is also running. So, this is where multiple thing can run at the same time and I can start another session and say, "Can you some ideas on how to improve the UI UX of the product?" I can run that too. And you'll see that if you check in, it it's showing you the progress and the time it's elapsed and also how much code is being changed with the plus sign and or how much is being deleted. You can see all the changes it's making in the code base. And when you see this blue icon, it means that the task has been completed. You can also turn on notification where it will show up on the top right of your Mac that a task has been completed. I turned it off because it was just popping up all the time, but if that's something you like, you can have it run as well. And now all three tasks are done and let's see if it actually fixed the problem. So, you see this is out of place. Let's turn it off and run it again. All right. And the time frame wording is gone completely and that's been fixed. So, happy with that. And for the gamification, it's giving me some suggestions on adding basically a badge and milestones and I kind of like the idea. So, let's try to build it. So, I turn on the build mode right now. I switch back to GPT 5.2. Yes. Yes, proceed with this plan. And then let's see what happens. So, you can run multiple sessions at the same time, but let me show you something else. I don't have just one product, but I have multiple products. I can open another project and in there I can also run multiple sessions. So, I can be working on two projects at the same time and each project can be running multiple sessions at the same time as well. So, you can be running many, many things at the same time. All right, and it's added the streaks and so, let's go back into the app and let's check it out and there it is. I've added a streak count, 3-day, 7-day, 14-day, 30-day. Str- looking really good. I think I could do a little bit more by showing more than just 3, 7, 14, and 30. But, no, it's done a good job. So, looking very good. Okay, now let's look into some of the more advanced features it offers. And one of the secrets is that you can type the slash command and a lot of cool things show up. Okay, let's start with the first command, which is the init instruction. It creates an agents.md file. I would highly recommend doing this because Open Code will read all your files and your folder structures and create file that makes it more efficient to run in the future. So, if you want to save your tokens and do more faster, definitely worth running this command and now it's running and you can see that it's running some code style guidelines, formatting, naming conventions, error handling, and creating this agents.md And just to showcase its parallel feature, I'm going to start a new session and let's do the second thing, which is review. What does the review command do? It basically looks at your code, checks for security vulnerabilities, any potential bugs or issues or styling issues, and it just goes through your code and make sure it's in a good state. And I run this from time to time and I also refactor my code from time to time if I'm adding a whole bunch of features because sometimes you might add in some code that's not used anymore and you want to remove that to keep your file size smaller. And here it's come back with some issues and that's great, you know, it's realized there's a issue in my current streak and it should fix that. I think it's a good idea to fix it. Can you please fix it? And then here's the agents.md and let's take a look. It's realized that it's an Xcode project and it's listed all these things. Naming conventions, concurrency, error handling. And so, this this is actually really useful because in the future it will reduce the tokens required to run my project. So, useful to run and always initialize a new project. Okay, next thing we're going to do is look into MCPs. So, you can toggle on and off your MCPs and here I've added Playwright. It has ability to open a browser and pretend to be user and click around and do stuff for me using an AI agent. The MCP I want to add is Context 7 and basically is an MCP that will help me save tokens again by allowing it to read API documentation and libraries at a much lower cost than reading everything at once. So, to use Context 7, I need to sign up and generate an API key and then I need to add this to the configuration file. So, if I come to Open Code, it says you have to add something like this to my configuration file. And now I have a hack here where I can use warp.dev that I mentioned earlier and I want to say find the global open code.json. That's where the configuration file is because I hate clicking around and finding the right directory and the right file. And this allows me to kind of quickly find a global file. Once it's found a global file, I'm going to ask it to add this bit of code inside. And I will share the code in the description. You can get it there as well. I'm adding the contact 7 MCP to the open code file. And then I accept the change. Can you open the file using Sublime note editor so I can add in the API key. So here you see that it's added this to my config file and all I need to do is copy and paste my API key. I signed up for contact 7 and I get like a free API key with a thousand requests. So I'm going to generate that and put it in. I'm going to label it open code. Paste it in. Save. And then let's close and restart open code and see if it's added successfully. So I'll come here, MCP, toggle MCPs. There you have it. Contact 7 is added. Even though I added contact 7, I keep forgetting to call contact 7. You have to say use contact 7 specifically. So inside the documentation actually suggests adding a rule. Always use contact 7 when I need library documentation. So how do you add this rule to open code? So remember the agents.md file when we initialize the project? Well, we're going to go do that. I'm going to go to open code and say add this rule to the agents.md. And there you go. It's added the rule to the agents.md file and from now on it's going to save me tokens and call contact 7 on its own without me calling it. And so that's how you add MCP servers to improve your coding experience combined with rules. Now that we've gone through the desktop app, let's go through the terminal app and check out the command line interface. I'm going to use Warp here, but you don't have to use Warp. You can just open terminal or you can use Ghosty or whatever terminal app you use. And the first thing I need to do is to open my directory. So I go to CD, go to projects, and then I drag and drop the location. This means change directory. And then it'll ask you to optimize and of course I do want to optimize. Okay, now how do you bring up open code? All you need to do is type in open code and voila, you're in. So you can do the same things you can do on your desktop app, but now you need to use these keys. So control T allows me to control the variant. So how many tokens capped? I can press tab to change agent, so planning or building. And then control P allows me to switch models. So I can choose and you can see that the desktop version allows me to have more selection. The desktop only gives me three options, but the terminal is way more powerful. Allows me to choose way more options than the desktop app. Super powerful stuff here. So that's why you would use the terminal because it's just got way more functionality. Also, when I type the slash button, I have more options to choose from. So I can choose a theme. So let's say Tokyo night, solarized. I can go orange. I'm going to stick with the original cuz I like it, but you can change the color scheme. I can see the status and I can go to sessions and I can see all the sessions that are happening right now. Right now, I can only run one task at a time. What if I want to be like the desktop and run multiple sessions at the same time? Well, what I can do is I can go to split pane right and I can keep clicking it and open three or four panels and then I do open code, open code, open code. And all of a sudden I have four tabs open and I can run four sessions at the same time in the same project. What if I want to run another project? Well, I can just click here and open a new tab and I can open another project and I can have multiple sessions within that project as well. So you can do the same thing you did in desktop app and run multiple sessions and agents at the same time as well. So much like Claude, you can also add skills to your open code. So what are skills? Skills are reusable sets of instructions. So if you're running certain commands over and over again, it might be useful to turn into a skill. So let's try to add that skill inside open code. Can you help me create a skill for Xcode refactor patterns and help me add it to the skills.md? And now it's created a refactoring skill, which is going to help clean up my code and make it run better. To run the skill I'll need to restart. I'm going to close this, come back to open code. Now let's try. Can you run the Xcode refactor pattern skill? Ah, turns out I I added an extra S to the MD file. It needs to be skill and not skills. Don't make the same mistake I made. So now it's recognized my Xcode refactor pattern skill and is now running the refactoring. Pick one for me and run it. And there you have it. It's running a skill. Now I want to show you our commands. So what are commands? When you tap on the slash button, all of these options are commands. And you can add to them. So I think a useful command for me is get, commit, and push. So I'm going to try and add that. So I'm going to copy open code.ai/commands. Using this as a reference, can you add a command called that commits and pushes for me? Let's see if we can add the command. So it's successfully added the command. So let's give it a shot. I open up open code. Let's look for get. Get push. And there you have it. I have a new command. Now I'm going to show you an advanced feature. Imagine you can run open code on your mobile phone just like this. I'm going to show you how to do it using Termius. Let's get started. So to run open code on your iPhone, you need to set up your Mac as a server where it's running the open code. Then you need to download Termius, the app, and connect via SSH to basically run open code on your computer, but displayed on your iPhone screen. Now, in this demo I'm just going to show you how to make it run when you're on the same network within this in the same house or the same office. If you want to run it remotely while you're out and taking a bus ride or driving a car, you'll need to set up more stuff to create a split tunnel so then you can connect remotely to your computer. But that's going to be another video because it's not easy at all. And if you're interested, stay tuned for my next video where I'll go through how to use Cloudflare to do that. But to get started, you need to set up SSH connection on your MacBook. So first thing you need to do is go to system settings and then go to sharing and you need to enable remote login. And then you need to add a user account. And when you log in, you just type in the name and the password you use to log in to your Mac. And now you've enabled remote connection to your Mac using SSH. You need to download the Termius app. So on your iPhone, search for Termius and download the free app. After you've downloaded Termius app, open it and go to hosts. Click on discover local devices. You should see your Mac here as long as you're connected on the same Wi-Fi network. Click on it, click tick, enter the username, and then the same password you used to log in to your Mac. You should see a terminal and then all I need to do is type open code and boom, you've got open code running. Like I said, this only works if you're on the same Wi-Fi network. I will produce another video to show you how you can connect remotely when you're outside, traveling on the bus, or whatever using Cloudflare and split tunnels. Stay tuned for my next video. I hope you enjoyed this video and gained a better understanding of open code. If you enjoyed the video, please like and subscribe to my channel. If you want to learn more about AI, feel free to join my free AI community. You can join my community for free inside the description. I also have a vibe coding course. If you want to learn how to code, you can also find that inside my community. See you inside.