Choose Your Hammer Wisely 3: Coding Assistants
A friend made a prediction when Anthropic blocked Claude Code usage via opencode. It was wise and cynical: model providers will prioritize routing the best models, the best brains, the most compute to users of their own TUI tools. Over time this gap will matter enough that open source coding agent harnesses like pi, openclaw, opencode, aider, and the rest won’t be able to compete.
His argument is logical. But I think the endgame looks different. We will learn to use the best models to compose and teach smaller models to complete tasks and subtasks efficiently. There’s a long road to get there.
The OAuth Unlock
The coolest thing to me was using my Claude Code subscription by default with openclaw and pi agent harnesses instead of burning dev API credits. I was unaware this was possible until I asked Claude to read the code in those projects and explain their OAuth flow. Dumb in retrospect but it was a significant unlock for how I use coding agents day to day.
What I Actually Use
I have not tried opencode or amp yet. I’ve heard good things about both. I’ll update this post once I do.
Right now I rotate between three setups:
- Codex for audits
- Claude Code for coding tasks
- A minimal pi agent harness using my custom skills and hooks
The pi harness is a fork I haven’t open sourced yet. I will once I’m convinced it’s useful to anyone besides me.
More than once I’ve had to use Codex to fix issues that Claude Code refuses to fix for one reason or another. Different tools, different strengths. Choose your hammer wisely.
The West Coast Advantage
I suspect model providers route their best models and heaviest inference to the West Coast. This is a hunch, not confirmed. But working from the East Coast, I feel the difference.
I’ve used a VPN more than once to get around it. It doesn’t fully work because VPNs add their own latency. You can have the intelligence or the speed but not both unless you live on the West Coast.
If this hunch is correct, it must be worse outside the USA entirely. The American advantage in AI tooling may be more alive than ever. Then again, many great devs live overseas. Hard to gauge the magnitude of this geographic edge or how it changes moving forward.