After Trying Every Coding Agent Setup, What Workflow Actually Survived — and What Does It Cost Per Month?
philzxx · reddit · 2026-08-28
A user deep in the AI-coding-workflow rabbit hole opened a discussion laying out the full decision tree people face:
- Harness: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi/OMP, etc.
- Provider/subscription: Claude Max, ChatGPT, OpenRouter, coding plans, API
- Different models for planning, implementation, research and review
- Skills/workflows like Matt Pocock's Wayfinder → spec → tickets → implement
- GitHub Issues as the source of work, with blocking/dependency relationships
- Deterministic gates for tests, lint, typecheck, review loops
- Higher-level orchestration tools like Scape, Conductor, Emdash, Orca, cmux
His goal isn't zero-supervision perfection, but post-spec autonomy with deterministic gates catching most failures — the human shifts from programmer to project manager. For internal tools, prototypes and automations, "good enough really is good enough."
He's candid about the friction: harnesses lock you into providers, model-agnostic ones need more config, skills solve planning but not execution, and orchestration adds yet another layer. His key questions: are people running this spending hundreds to thousands of dollars a month? Does the tiered approach (strong model for architecture, cheap/open-weight for implementation, deterministic gates, strong independent reviewer) actually save money, or do retries eat the savings? He wants the architecture and economics of workflows that survived, not model-vs-model comparisons.
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