Older models may not know how to tool call which is required for read/write access, in general stay with models released this year.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B works well for 24GB RAM + 8GB VRAM (I run it on 32+8 via llama.cpp).
Regarding permissions, opencode should have default write permissions by default to current folder and will ask for permission for read/write to external folders (such as /tmp) only when needed.