1. OpenAI and Anthropic, both at their 100 USD tiers, one account each. Would do 200 USD but I need the money to help a friend instead.

2. Previously yes (esp. to try out new models on OpenRouter, like GLM 5.3 or Kimi K3.1 Pro and the various DeepSeek ones, Mistral ones etc.) before also having their subscriptions for a bit. Wrote about them on my blog, seemed like nice alternatives to OpenAI and Ant, but didn't give me as many tokens (and that's with the BS those two are occasionally pulling).

3. Codex and Claude Code, for a while had a custom launcher for Claude Code (ccode) for 3rd party providers, also tried out OpenCode (really nice CLI, but barebones web UI/desktop versions), alongside additional ADEs like Paseo (really pleasant, but sub-agent status updates hanged sometimes) and Kepler (cool ticketing system integration, but the UI wasn't very pleasant), before just going back to the two in the end. Same as with MCPs and other stuff, realized I just don't need most of them, near-SOTA models are good enough to automate long form work and work in parallel well enough, all you need are Git worktrees and a decent OS environment to work in. Still waiting for some dumb agent to wipe my drive though.

4. No, closest was Paseo or Kepler, but those tools would help me more rather than beat the agents into shape. The most I do orchestration wise is demand adversarial reviews (main session often spawns sub-agents for implementation and then has sub-agents with clear context for review in a loop, if issues are found, they're solved, then back to review, until nothing too serious remains), seems like even SOTA models fuck up consistently enough that they benefit from such reviews still. Meanwhile the most I do in regards to work is nudge how to best do exploration and division of work, when I know that something will need a bunch of parallelism or not to pollute the main context with bunches of side quests.

5. No. Maybe I should, but given how often LLMs lack decent judgement when the tasks are underspecified, I don't think I'd benefit a lot. My ALL-CAPS-SWEARING/SESSION metric is still higher than I'd expect from a reliable assistant system, despite agent instructions and memories and custom tools and linters and all that. In a word, even SOTA models still do stupid shit and bog down workable designs with complexities and mechanisms and concerns that nobody fucking needs. Computer use is pretty good though.