Hands-on test of the mysterious model Omen Alpha: I rapidly put together the "Niu Lai" version of YouTube in 25 minutes with it.
Reported by Zhidx on September 9, recently, an anonymous model named Omen Alpha emerged unexpectedly and quickly sparked widespread discussions for its extremely high cost-effectiveness.
5 days after its launch, under the impact of the free model Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor, it still ranks 7th on the OpenCode call volume leaderboard. Developers are guessing which company's new model this is, and some netizens commented that "It's another mysterious model from the East".
In community tests, most users' consistent feedback is that it is "fast". A developer only spent 1 hour and 30 minutes using Omen Alpha to complete the modeling of a simple 3D world, and the effect is quite good.
In comparison, the same developer used GLM 5.3 Flash and GPT 5.6 Luna for development with the same prompts, which took nearly 3 hours, but the development styles of these models are completely different, and everyone can compare them by themselves.
Currently, Omen Alpha is only available in the OpenCode Go subscription package. The $10 plan comes with a $100 usage quota. If calculated based on the usage quota, the price of this model is incredibly low.
Judging from the price, this model should also be positioned at the flash level, and most of the models with similar price ranges in OpenCode are lightweight models. The summary of models with similar prices to Omen Alpha in OpenCode's internal billing is as follows:
With full expectations for this cost-effective anonymous model, Zhidx has conducted multi-dimensional actual tests on it. During the test, we found that Omen Alpha is a model with visual capabilities, and it performs outstandingly in front-end design and development speed.
At the same time, this model has some problems in logical reasoning, showing a situation of prioritizing speed over intellectual performance.
01.
Recognize Republic of China era newspapers in seconds
Develop a "Niu Lai" themed YouTube in 25 minutes
At the beginning of the actual test, we first verified the visual capability of Omen Alpha, input an image of the Republic of China Daily, and asked it to identify and organize the content.
After thinking for a few seconds, Omen Alpha quickly gave the answer, identified that this is the first issue of the Republic of China Daily, and organized all the information on the newspaper into text, showing quite good visual capabilities.
Then, we assigned a relatively simple status bar plugin development task to Omen Alpha, and made the prompts as brief as possible to see how it performs in understanding intentions through images during plugin development and tuning.
When processing this task, Omen Alpha had a fairly accurate understanding of the image content, and all the functions I needed were in the development list. During the development process, there was a problem that the color of the functional area was too light. After adjusting the screenshot, Omen Alpha completed a relatively rough plugin, but it is generally usable.
Since the prompt did not have any specifications for front-end design, the above test cannot demonstrate the front-end development capability of Omen Alpha. So we designed a prompt that "is small in size but fully featured", asking Omen Alpha to make a "Niu Lai version" YouTube by referring to reference images and web pages. The prompt is as follows:
Based on this screenshot of the YouTube web page, replicate the entire web page as 1:1 as possible, including the top navigation, search box, left sidebar, category tags, video card grid, font, spacing, rounded corners, icons and other visual structures. Do not only make a static page, but realize a real interactive front end. The search box can input and display search results, the sidebar and category tags can switch content, the video card can click to enter the video detail page, the author can enter the channel page, the more button can pop up the operation menu, and realize basic interactive logic such as return and recommended videos, as well as good adaptation for desktop and mobile terminals.
Replace all video content on the page with the "Niu Lai" theme: use the provided cow picture as the cover of all videos, and synchronously modify the video title, author, play volume, release time, introduction, comments and other copywriting, so that the entire website looks like a real "Niu Lai themed YouTube". After completion, please run and check the web page by yourself, actively modify after finding layout, visual or interactive problems, and finally ensure that the page is not only visually close to YouTube, but also fully operable.
In the actual test, we found that Omen Alpha's pre-thinking time is very long. Before it started to develop this web page, it spent a full 8 minutes thinking, while the entire development process only took 25 minutes.
But Omen Alpha's development speed is indeed very fast. After a lot of pre-thinking, there is almost no pause during the execution process. It processes materials, writes front-end pages and then conducts tests in one go. The final presentation effect is as follows:
The overall web page development effect surprised us a lot. The page images are all adapted, the titles and bottom comments have generated interesting "Niu Lai" versions, the interaction is also very smooth, and the functions such as playback progress bar, subscription, favorite and like are the same as the original website.
From visual capabilities to front-end development, although the pre-thinking time and thought chain are a bit lengthy, the effects presented by Omen Alpha are quite good, with particularly outstanding performance in speed.
02.
Tank Battle, Dungeon Roguelike, Dodging Ball
Game development speed is extremely fast
Coming to the game development section that tests the comprehensive capabilities of the model, Zhidx started with three games, dividing them into three levels from easy to difficult for Omen Alpha to develop.
First, we asked Omen Alpha to make a simple dodge ball mini-game. It took less than 3 and a half minutes, including two rounds of testing.
The final deliverable is a very simple mini-game, but the falling of the ball, dodging actions and scoring system are all complete, with a certain degree of playability.
Then, we entered an "old prompt" used to test the development capabilities of different models, with the goal of developing a demo of the classic game "Tank Battle". The prompt is as follows:
Develop a complete classic FC "Tank Battle" web game, implemented with HTML, CSS and native JavaScript, without relying on any third-party libraries. The game adopts a retro pixel style, including complete gameplay such as player tank movement, shooting, enemy AI patrol and attack, destructible brick walls, indestructible steel walls, grass, rivers, item drops, health points, points, level upgrades, Boss, explosion effects, sound effects, pause, restart, local highest score saving, etc. The operation is smooth, the collision detection is accurate, it runs at 60FPS, and all codes are encapsulated in a directly runnable HTML file with clear code structure and English comments.
Omen Alpha took 44 minutes, including more than 20 minutes of planning time, which is much faster than some cutting-edge models. It performs well in pictures, walls, movement, scoring and shell elimination. However, there are some basic logic problems, such as all enemy tanks are piled on the left side, and the player's counterattack space is too small.
However, it is worth mentioning that when Zhidx tested some top models before, although the generated results with the same prompt were more playable, there were also many problems. Considering comprehensively from speed and quality, Omen Alpha's performance is still commendable.
Finally, Zhidx entered a prompt for an open 2D pixel style dungeon roguelike game, referring to "Dead Cells", to see how Omen Alpha performs in the development of action games.
The requirements of this task are relatively complex. It is necessary to keep the character's movements coherent, the switching of attack methods, and the basic logic of side-scrolling fighting games such as being hit and stiff correct. At the same time, the random drop, upgrade and enhancement of roguelike games require fine programming.
Omen Alpha still maintains the style of super long thinking time, but this time due to the high difficulty of game development, it took nearly two hours to complete the whole process from planning, development to testing. The final effect is as follows:
It can be seen that without reference information, the game developed by Omen Alpha presents a strong pixel style, the logic of roguelike games, character jumping, being hit are all normal, but it is quite different from the original work, the hit effect is relatively weak, and the playability is average.