Mastering OpenCode: AI Agents, Skills, MCP & Automation

“This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.”

Every AI coding assistant ties you to one thing you didn't actually ask for: a single model, from a single company, forever. Use Claude Code, and you're on Claude. Use Copilot, and you're on OpenAI's models. The moment a better model launches - faster, cheaper, more accurate for exactly what you're building - you can't just try it. You have to abandon your entire tool and rebuild your workflow from zero, just to swap out the engine underneath it.

OpenCode fixes that. It's an open-source, terminal-native AI coding agent that separates the tool from the model entirely - install it once, and plug in whichever model you want underneath: Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-source models, even models running locally. No lock-in, no rebuilding your workflow every time a new model drops. And because it's open-source with its own model marketplace (OpenCode Zen), you can start building with free models today, with zero API keys and zero subscription.

This course takes you from zero to production with OpenCode - not just a features tour, but real, hands-on demos for every concept. You'll start by understanding exactly what OpenCode is, how it compares to Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Amazon Q, and how its pricing model actually works (free core, bring-your-own-key, or OpenCode's own Go/Zen plans). Then you'll install it across every interface it offers - CLI/TUI, Desktop app, and VS Code extension — and build a real, working monitoring application from scratch, extending it step by step as you learn.

From there, you'll go deep into what makes OpenCode genuinely extensible. You'll learn OpenCode's slash commands and build your own custom commands, define project rules with AGENTS md file, install and use Skills, and understand how Tools and permissions work under the hood. You'll then combine all of it - rules, skills, tools, and agents — to rebuild your application the right way. A full section is dedicated to Agents, Subagents, and Permissions, where you'll design your own Security Scanner and Security Fixer agents and put them to work finding and fixing real issues in your code.

The course closes with a deep, hands-on section on MCP (Model Context Protocol) - the open standard that lets OpenCode connect to external tools and services. You'll cover MCP's architecture, primitives, and communication model properly, then connect OpenCode to a local filesystem MCP server, a remote GitHub MCP server, and finally to n8n - both exposing n8n workflows as tools OpenCode can call, and having OpenCode build and troubleshoot n8n workflows directly.

What makes this course different

Most OpenCode content online is either a quick "look what it can do" demo with no real explanation of why it's built this way, or a dry walkthrough of documentation. This course does both properly: accurate, complete coverage of how OpenCode actually works - rules, skills, tools, agents, permissions, MCP — paired with genuinely hands-on building, using one real application you extend across the entire course, so every concept lands in a project you built yourself, not a disconnected demo.

By the end of this course, you'll be able to:

• Explain what OpenCode is, how it differs from Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Amazon Q, and why separating the tool from the model matters

• Understand OpenCode's pricing model - free open-source core, BYOK, and OpenCode Go vs. Zen — and choose the right option for your use case

• Install and run OpenCode across its CLI/TUI, Desktop app, and IDE extension, and use its core slash commands confidently

• Build your own custom OpenCode commands, project rules, and installable Skills

• Design and run your own Agents and Subagents, including a working Security Scanner and Security Fixer, with a solid grasp of OpenCode's permission model

• Explain MCP's architecture (Host, Client, Server), its core primitives (Tools, Resources, Prompts), and how MCP messages actually travel

• Connect OpenCode to local, remote, and third-party MCP servers — including filesystem, GitHub, and n8n — in both directions

• Build a real, working application from scratch and extend it repeatedly as you layer in rules, skills, tools, agents, and MCP integrations