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Show HN: Octofriend, a cute coding agent that can swap between GPT-5 and Claude (github.com)

107 points by reissbaker ↗ HN
Hey HN! We're shipping Octofriend today, a cute coding assistant that can swap between GPT-5, Claude, local or open-source LLMs, etc mid-conversation as needed. It handles reasoning tokens (including encrypted ones from OpenAI and Anthropic) really well, and includes a couple of custom-trained ML models to fix minor diff edit and JSON encoding errors that we've also open-sourced. Have fun!

14 comments

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earino
This looks very interesting. I wish it came with some guides for using it with a local LLM. I have an MBP with 128gb of ram and I have been trying to find a local open source coding agent. This feels like it could be the thing.
ancientrevolver
Looks interesting! How would you say it compares against Claude/Gemini code or any of the other major terminal-based coding assistants?
dingnuts
wow the fake Studio Ghibli artwork is really unsettling. Seriously creepy uncanny valley vibes on top of the stolen style. I hate it. Please never do that again.
userbinator
The art is definitely creepy. I don't know how an octopus (or is that a decapus?) in a jar could be considered "cute". It reminds me of Cthulhu and undesirably branchy codebases.
rbren
Quick plug for the OpenHands CLI: https://docs.all-hands.dev/usage/how-to/cli-mode

We're working on creating an SDK that will allow other folks to build their own CLIs with OpenHands, so you can take advantage of our SOTA agent, but implement the TUI/GUI of your dreams.

ascorbic
This looks interesting, but it is quite buggy. A few things I've found:

- error handling is not good. It just dumps the error JSON in the console, and doesn't read and understand it, so keeps retrying even if it's something that it clearly needs to change

- ESC is pretty unreliable at interrupting ongoing activity

- I'd expect to be able to use arrow keys to navigate through history

- is there a way to change the preference order for models?

It succeeded in my standard task of adding support for detecting itself to am-i-vibing, but it got stuck in some API errors before it was able to create a PR. It does now have support though after a little help: https://github.com/ascorbic/am-i-vibing

esafak
After reading this comment I checked the repo's tests. There were few.
esafak
How does it differ from existing ones like Aider and OpenCode, besides being less mature?
insane_dreamer
The main problem for me is that afaik the only agent that works with Claude Max subscription is Claude Code.
wkirby
Looking forward to trying this out. An early comment: I would love to be able to override tool descriptions and system prompts from a config. Especially when working with local models, context management is king and the tool descriptions can be a hidden source of uncontrollable context.
Incipient
Do you have any typical costs for various models, for a "typical" day of use? 6 hours of sitting at desk writing code (rather than code reviews etc)
throwdbaaway
With GLM-4.5, we can disable thinking by appending /nothink to the user message. Is that how we suppose to use Octofriend, e.g. "Plan looks good. Go ahead and implement feature X. /nothink"
reissbaker
If you're using GLM-4.5, sure! That'll work.