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?
Opencode with local inference (via ollama) Have tried gpt-oss-20b, qwen3.6-30somethingB and gemma4-e4b. Qwen is too slow for my hardware and gemma4 does not follow instructions that well. Haven’t spend much time (yet) but gpt-oss seems like a good balance.
For work I also use opencode but with either claude-opus or deepseek-v4-pro. Obviously opus is stronger, but deepseek is still surprisingly capable and I have more control (can’t figure out how to show opus reasoning traces) so I prefer it.
That said, I still write code myself 90% of the time. I just use llm for questions, codereview, etc.