My use cases are mostly analytical work, document generation, and code generation and review.

I used to have the Pro subcription for Claude but switched recently to the equivalent Plus subscription for ChatGPT. With Anthropic, you cannot access their inference servers without going through one their client software or paying the API pricing. It is really annoying as those are two different product categories and I'd like to use the client of my choice with an LLM. OpenAI allows you to do that, so I have a proxy running on my computer which connects to OpenAI's servers in the back ground and serves locally a Chat Completions-compliant API, with the requests counting towards my subscription.

I also have an OpenRouter account, I use it regularly but mostly to explore new models and see what's out there. I wish I used it more but the bigger part of my requests, almost all of them, go through my subscription. My thinking is since I'm already paying for it, might as well use it. Which is a shame because it prevents me from exploring more.

I even think a combination of the free tier of Big AI with a pay-as-you-go pricing for more complex requests would actually be cheaper for most people than their current subscription, even with their heavily subsidized pricing. The problem is that most people wouldn't want to think of when they should go deeper with a bigger model and wouldn't want the mental task of switching. The same way people don't really switch thinking levels with a given model, even though it would be a more optimal use of their token pool.

There is a huge market for an alternative business model around LLM inference. The big providers will obviously go towards an ad-based model in the following years, which will be good enough for the greater public, but a lot of people and small companies would be interested in packages and subscriptions that suit their specific needs and lines of work. OpenRouter has a great product and there is so much possiblity in this space. I also believe there is so much potential in the development of models based on data primitives other than text or rasterized images, which would be really useful in a lot of industries.

For the frontend, I either use the web-based version of ChatGPT for quick questions and analytical work (the desktop version is unnecessarily heavy), or Open WebUI. For coding, I mostly use Zed. I like the traditional development environment and tooling, I tried several agent-first environments, but in the end I prefer an IDE on top of which agents were added. OpenCode Web has evolved a lot, I have been using it for quick scripting as well. I never use any coding agent TUI anymore. Behind the scenes, the agent harnesses are OpenCode and Codex. I use them interchangeably, I don't see much of a difference. Zed connects to OpenCode and Codex through ACP. Both OpenCode and Open WebUI connects to OpenRouter and the OpenAI Proxy. Open WebUI has Open Terminal, which I have been meaning to explore, for there to be less friction between any analytical work and a document that would be needed to be produced out of it. I also run small models through llama.app from time to time, when I want to be reminded how weak my computer is.

I don't use any orchestration tool. I don't have any work that involves so much volume that it would require that kind of setup. It's more important to me to maintain the right mental model, I don't want to risk any discrepancies between what I'm thinking and what's done. Therefore the agentic work must be single-threaded, if that makes sense. I also don't use AI chat gateways like OpenClaw or Muse because I don't want to do that work on my phone every minute of my life. I'm either working or I'm not.

This comment is longer than expected. It's such a fascinating and still evolving space.