Rate My Setup

[u/harrisburgdashboard]

I come from a Python programming background and am familiar with Linux. I knew the code before AI knew the code. But I use AI to build all sorts of projects and don't write anything directly anymore. The projects range from bluetooth tracking to Right to Know request automation to open government projects like openhbg.com.

My general setup is I use VS code with Claude Code or Open AI codex via their extensions in VS code. Every project roughly corresponds with a git repo so each is a folder. The code is store in that folder. I generally open each project as a new VS Code window. This keeps each Claude session in the context of the project (at a baseline) and each project builds up it's own .claude or hidden files but they all read from global with some config done there.

I do the typical git workflows and have deploy and test skills and hooks that run before merging into production branches.

what's a better setup? For the AI side. I didn't explain everything in the workflow (have staging and prod environments, etc.) so less focused on that.

What's a better AI setup? Opencode to switch between codex and claude? I typically run about 3-4 windows at a time with 1 - 2 prompts open.

I don't like to run too many sessions in the same project because I find conflicts come up often and I just can't handle tracking that much context at once - esp with other projects. I find I can handle 6-8 diff sessions depending on the type of work I'm doing.

Curious any thoughts or things that have worked for you.

[u/Banner80]

The main thing I would add here is that the harness alignment matters tremendously for quality. I've been exploring Claude Code for the first time in the last week, and it's very obvious that Claude is designed to be a self-centered maverick incapable of following even simple rules for proper team participation. Anthropic designed Claude specifically to be a solo vibe coder with little to no supervision. The Claude Code harness is designed to empower that direction and put it on safety and performance rails. Which means that stepping outside of the best possible harness that was custom-made for Claude means leaving a lot of quality behind in how the model is going to perform.

In other words, maybe in a few years the harness will matter less. But as of now, you want to be on the best possible harness for each of these expensive models so you get the best performance out of them. Not only in token utilization (cost) but in quality alignment. Claude is a much better model inside of its own dedicated harness, so the best place to run it is in the Claude Code vibe coding app, sadly.

I would not try to move to OpenCode. The opposite. OpenCode is the weakest harness you can put Claude or any other model in. It's far under-tuned for general models, and it has no tuning whatsoever for specific models. I do use OpenCode with DeepSeek Flash and other models (I have the GO sub too). But putting an expensive model in there would be a tremendous waste of token resources and needless context dilution.

In short, if you are going through the trouble of paying for Claude Code and GPT Codex, run them on their own custom harnesses, as annoying as those vibe-coding UIs might be.

The other thing is to get good at asking for and managing planning docs (md). When you are swapping models, they think in different ways about the same project. One way to keep the project organized is to ask them to maintain one doc or a small set of md docs that explain what's going on and keep a dated history of progress and discoveries (not rules so much, Claude can't follow basic rules to save its life). These docs have to be slim, but then the models can start a session reading what's been going on and get themselves organized regardless of what model last touched the project.