AI tools I use — Aug 2026

I keep changing things to discover more tools every day … Some notes on my latest update:

I'm off the Claude Max 20x subscription now. Still think Claude Code works best with their own models — using it with another model isn't what it used to be. See the new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models. Fable is really good; Opus 5 leaves me cold.

Tried Codex. Left a few times. The app still doesn't work for me. I just don't like it — hard to control things.

Herdr + Grok Build CLI is my main stack now. SuperGrok Heavy is $300 and that's a hard price to swallow, but the terminal quality is first-class. Herdr is replacing tmux and will become much better for AI, I think, so far. The things I love about Herdr: persistent state, works across machines, can control the agent itself, cool worktree story.

Grok Bot still feels like the best design I can imagine for a good agent and assistant, and I wrote it up at blog.duyet.net/2026/08/grok-bot. It's just simple and does really well. They move fast and fix a lot; it works effectively, not aspirationally. No FOMO — you should try it if you can. You can also grab some templatebot.lol here.

anyrouter.dev/cli — I keep trying to make this mainstream, and it's not good enough honestly. The upstream providers are still unstable, and finding good sources is the actual bottleneck.