My current LLM-assisted setup
Posted on 2026.10.20
I've been developing a small-business management app with a main target of my father's company. You know, a side project that allows you to experiment with stuff and also is useful. Here is a summary what AI-coding tools and workflows I'm currently using. Because, yes, I am using LLMs for developing that app. It would take me years to get it into the state that it is now - usable tool for a small business.
Subscriptions
I'm a cheapskate hence I am not paying for 100x subscriptions. I'm using the 20 EUR subscriptions from OpenAI and Anthropic. I bought once or twice the OpenCode Go but I'm so spoiled by those sweet, sweet token subsidies from the AI Oligarchs and VCs that it makes the Go subscription kind of useless.
Models
Models are changing super fast hence this section will get outdated in a week or two. Currently, I'm switching between those models:
- Sol-6.1
- opus-5.5
- sonnet-5.5
- luna-6 - mostly for work coordination
Models I don't like: opencode/beam-free - I didn't manage to get any work done with it yet wasted a lot of tokens on.
Harnesses
Since I am paying for Codex and Claude, I used to use mostly those two. Also, I am using a lot of Tidewave - I'm developing in Elixir Live View and Tidewave is amazing for that. Recently I decided to try out Pi, and gosh, I should have started much sooner.
Pi, I thought it will be too much of fooling around. But no, it's smooth and easy. It makes so much easier to work with multiple model providers. I just make a bunch of issues in beads, and then make a small model dispatch that work to different models and coordinate review of all those changes. Sweet. I started just last week so there is plenty of experimentation laying ahead.
Tidewave
Tidewave is also kind of a harness but it totally deserves a separate section. So Tidewave is currently an IDE and MCP, built into your Elixir Live View app. I think it also supports React and maybe Vue.
Anyway, what is it? This will be purely from perspective of Elixir and Live View. It started as an easy MCP that, I think, was just set of skills around using the app, debugging, querying DB through the iEx console. It had significantly grown since then - it's kind of a full blown browser-based IDE with chat integrated into it. And the killer feature of that IDE is the visual aspect of the work with LLM. Indicate an element of the page and ask the LLM to change the code. And magic happens, smooth like butter in terms of that aspect. Obviously, the standard LLM-related problems stay, and iterating on the interface with clankers can sometimes be a tedious tug of war which results only in burning tokens.
But all in all, who cares about IDE, right? Kinda, yes. So Tidewave has some other tricks in the sleeve that allow any harness to navigate through an Live View app with ease. First, the MCP I mentioned previously, solid thing. Then, you have the Tidewave Toolbar - if you have tidewave installed in your app, it will be shown on any client that is connected to a dev server. It essentially gives you the same interaction tools for coordinating interaction between model and the your app as the IDE does. And it just gives you a text of the prompt it builds internally to pass through any harness. The last thing is the Connect. It's essentially an interface for the model itself to interact with your app - the model suddenly can navigate the site and use vision as it would be able to do within the Tidewave IDE.
This means, we can ditch the IDE for PI! Amazing.
The big minus of the tidewave, at least in the IDE version. It goes through so many tokens. So many!
TLDR
- Pi is great as it doesn't tie you to a single provider.
- Tidewave is amazing for a fullstack development of Elixir Live View apps, I bet for JS frontends too.