I use AI primarily through work, I don't pay for a personal AI sub.

I do have some OpenRouter credits but I mostly use them sparingly to try open weight models out for small personal projects.

I currently interact primarily with Claude Code, but most of my async workers are on Codex.

The orchestration part is custom. I talk to a "chief of staff" Opus instance to ingest various workstreams (Jira tickets, alerts, personal ideas, etc) and turn them into beads. It launches workers to tackle individual beads using Remuda, an agent launcher I wrote at work in 2025 and open sourced earlier this year: https://github.com/yendo-eng/remuda. I configure profiles in Remuda that launch containerized agents using my preferred harness and model. I update these profiles as the pareto frontier shifts. Currently it's GPT 6 Luna max for most tasks.

It monitors the workers and has them go through at least one round of agentic code review. It surfaces PRs for me to read once they've passed agent review. It then either ships them or hands them off to my coworkers for codebases where I'm not allowed to just merge PRs.

Around this workflow I had it write a small collection of skills and scripts to grease the wheels and make repetitive actions more reliable.

Since Remuda supports several terminal multiplexers, I've swapped out the backend 3 times: tmux -> herdr-tui -> herdr-core. There's experimental support for Rex but I'm waiting for it to mature a bit before I try and daily drive it.

It's not nearly as polished as some of the software factory setups and fancy GUI orchestrators I'm seeing, but it's light, hackable, and so far the bitter lesson has kept this working really well for me so I haven't felt much of a need to try anything else.

I have been trying out Muse for a while but it hasn't found a solid place in my life yet. Still too unreliable and too many privacy concerns to justify giving it a lot of access.