Given how quickly things evolve, it’s easy to get lost in the numerous offerings and hard to get the best deal. So, what do you use? Both clients/harnesses and LLM providers or local setups would be interesting.
Personally, I’ve been using opencode with Github copilot for work. I’m currently looking for cost-effective provider for personal work. Maybe openrouter with one of the cheap models?
Nothing. I threw them all out. After is forgot how to write good code and how to design good software.
That his how cerebral atrophy must feel like.
At work Cursor with Sonnet or Composer and very very few times Opus.
At home I can’t afford any of that so I use opencode and try to use super cheap models in openrouter and very few times to save money, I just delegate simple straightforward, tedious tasks to gemini flash or deepseek
I only use openwebui with an openai key that my employer pays for. No agentic stuff, haven’t found the need for that yet.
In work we use cursor. I generally use their composer model. Before that it was vscode with claude.
Personally i have not done any personal dev work in a long time, its mainly server maintenance and i can do that myself. When i get the itch to do more dev stuff ill probably use vscode with copilot. My personal machine isnt great for local models.
OpenCode Go/Zen have deepseek models that have the best cost-benefit out there. Then OpenRouter with selected providers if I want to try something else.
I don’t spend more than $20/month on personal projects and still manage to have a lot more functionality than I could have without AI.
At work claude code, at home zed+deepseek. I loaded up a few dollars in deepseek’s API and they are lasting a long long time (many months). I also tried qwen locally but it’s too slow for me (it runs on the CPU…). I use AI though only for repetitive and boring implementation tasks, or throwaway one-time scripts that I don’t feel like coding by hand. The point of coding at home for me is to have fun, and having the AI solve all interesting problems for me defeats entirely the purpose of why I’m coding. At work we are unfortunately being pushed to use AI a lot more, and the amount of slop code is increasing :(
I don’t like the term “AI coding”, but recently I have been playing with opencode with it’s hosted models and ollama for light local models. It’s good as a rubber ducky, an assistant, or co-programmer.
I’m experimenting a lot with goose, recently return on by the AI arm is the Linux foundation. It’s not yet mature enough to recommend it as a daily driver for non fanatics though for agentic stuff.
Trying it as a daily driver by now :D
It’s less about the tool though in my opinion but about the process. If you want to be a programmer then you need something integrated into your dev environment in my opinion.
My focus is seeing how far I come with focussing in being a software architect who only has really weird junior devs who read a lot of books but lack any understanding.
Which is … quite close to real life ;)
I’m splitting by now my projects: agentic ones and “my” dev ones, treating trm differently helped me tremendously: different focus and I need a different skillset.
A mix of gpt-5.5 and claude opus 4.7, wrapped in my own mobile web UI that doubles as planning software and document editor.
The reason for the mobile focus is I’ve been trying to detach from my home office as much as possible, meaning I do a lot of up-front planning via ADRs and task/story writing, then I spawn agents to actually work on coding tasks. The only part that really requires sitting at a desk is code review, manual testing, and deeper human-in-the-loop coding or debugging sessions.
If you are able to max out the $100/mo plans from either OpenAI or Anthropic, then that is already a very cost-effective option.
I’ve just started playing around more seriously and I bounce between cursor and Claude code in CLI. I’ll check out how chat behaves and sometimes random tools like blackbox.
