[verdverm]

I've gone fully custom and would never look back. All of the popular tools lack the experience I'm after, generally lacking the advanced customization I have found makes weaker models more capable. I'm also moving towards open weight models.

The underlying motivation is to avoid Big Ai as much as possible. Incentives are not aligned.

[kingkongjaffa]

> the advanced customization I have found makes weaker models more capable.

Like what?

[verdverm]

Good prompts and tools. When I first went down this path, I grabbed the Claude Code prompts and adapted them. Doing so made gemini-3-flash as good as pro for 80%+ of my normal tasks. I became spoiled with the turnaround time (much faster) and now become impatient with the mega models.

I can also do things like out the AGENTS.md contents in the system prompt and change file read to put contents there as well. Thai avoids duplicates in the messages when they fail at editing and decide to reread the file