My agentic coding setup [April 2026]
How I'm coding today and how it's changed over time
Occasionally I’ll scroll Twitter and see people claiming they run 10+ coding agents simultaneously. I’m genuinely curious how they’re pulling this off. Is this actually their workflow, or is it performative?
As a former professional software engineer, it’s insane just how much the profession has changed in the past 2 years, and especially in the past few months. 2 years ago I was still hand-coding with VSCode, augmented with a little line completion. 1 year ago I was using Cursor with GPT 4.5, letting it a file or two at a time, reading and reviewing all code the AI produced. Today I’m a whole lot more hands off.
It’s gone from me only trusting AI to complete single lines of code, to me trusting AI to write functions, to me trusting AI to write files, to me trusting AI to write entire features (and getting AI to review the code also).
I’ve been experimenting heavily with (semi) long-running coding agents lately, and my current max is around 5 concurrent agents. There are two big bottlenecks:
My own mental context window. I could be using an orchestrator agent with a kanban board to manage those agents, but I actually want to be hands on with the business logic. After 5 agents, I can no longer keep track of what’s going on. Possibly a skill issue.
My current codebases aren’t big enough for that many agents to work discrete features without bumping into each other and causing merge conflicts.
My current setup
Given the speed of changes in the devtools ecosystem, I’ve been tweaking my coding setup weekly. This is my current setup as of April 2026:
Conductor for managing agents (free)
As much as I like iTerm + Tmux, Conductor is a level up for managing agents. The sandboxing makes it much easier to manage multiple sessions. I would find it much much harder to manage multiple agents if not for Conductor.
Claude Code (Opus 4.7) – Max Plan 5x ($100 per month)
It’s great - I don’t have much to add about Claude Code that hasn’t already been written.
Claude Design is shockingly good also. Highly recommend. I’m no designer, but I’ve been using it a lot ever since it came out.
Codex (GPT 5.4) – ChatGPT Plus Plan ($20 per month)
I use a mix of both Claude Code and Codex. I originally started using Codex because I had been hitting Claude Code usage limits (I’m on the Max 5x plan), but then started to actually like it. Claude Code is still my primary coding agent, but I still use Codex to review the code that Claude Code produces. I don’t have strong opinions about the pros and cons of Codex versus Claude Code. I find them to be borderline interchangeable.
Gstack setup for Claude Code (free, thanks Garry Tan)
I opted to use Gstack rather than building out many of my own Skills because I’m probably not going to put in the cycles to maintain them just for myself, and I’m personally probably better off deferring to the best practices built up by the community.
Gstack forces clarifying questions upfront. I wish this was the default for coding agents - force more clarifying questions, so that the agents don’t try to overcomplicate every feature.
The /office-hours skill pretty neat.
Gstack adds a lot of input tokens into the context window. Sometimes the features are a bit overkill for me, and I only use a handful of the skills.
Claude Design removes the need for a lot of the Gstack design skills.
If I’m using local models, I’ve been using Ollama and mainly Qwen 3.5 9b and Gemma 4. I rarely use local open source models though because they’re too dumb for most of my use cases, and too slow running on my Macbook.
Is the code quality any good?
As for the quality of the code actually generated, it’s not terrible. I still toss out a significant amount of code, and refactor frequently, but it’s all workable. I rarely if ever find myself editing code by hand, which is pretty different from one year ago, back when I was using Cursor.
It's still very much a work in progress and I fully anticipate changing things as the space evolves on a daily basis.