Intro

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Then this is complete crap.

Tools

flowchart LR

subgraph access
Chat
Jetbrains
Local
Remote_Server
Phone
VSCode
Cherry_Studio
end

Agent_Mgmt_AgentDeck --> Opencode & Crush & Goose
Jetbrains --> AgentBridge_ACP --> Opencode
Chat --> Telegram_Gateway --> Hermes
Local --> Agent_Mgmt_AgentDeck
Local -->  Obsidian_AgentConsole_ACP  ---> Hermes
VSCode --> ACP_Client --> Opencode & Goose
Phone --> Termux --> Crush

Remote_Server --> Agent_Mgmt_AgentDeck
Remote_Server --> KanDev --> OpenCode
Remote_Server --> CodeNomad --> OpenCode
Remote_Server --> Minions --> Hermes

subgraph agent
Goose
Opencode
Crush
Hermes
end
  

Providers

flowchart LR
Github_Copilot --> work
OpenRouter --> home

subgraph work
github-copilot/gpt-5.6-luna
github-copilot/claude-haiku-4.5
end
subgraph home
openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731
opencode/big-pickle
end
  

Repository	Stars	License	Activity
kandev
agentbridge
agent-deck
obsidian-agent-console
minions
goose
crush
opencode
hermes-agent

Overthinking

https://www.instagram.com/thecrazyopossumlady/

So I’ve been dealing with a bit of a problem lately: AI tool bloat. I have so many different solutions and so many different ways of interacting with the same software, and it’s starting to become a real drag. At least for me specifically, I have a really nasty case of autism and ADHD, and I just struggle to focus sometimes. But also sometimes I get stuck, go down a rabbit hole with a billion things. It tends to be a bit of a hole. So at the end of the day, I just need something to be simple, and my tools to just work.

Clearly, all you have to do is look at https://jelloeater.me/apps
or https://jelloeater.me/ai to see I have a problem …

$DAY_JOB

For example, for work, I use a combination of tools. I use JetBrains IDE, I use VS Code, but I also have Codium — the second alternative, to have it feel a bit snappier, which is kind of silly, that I would have to have a second text editor because my first text editor is so bloated that I can’t even use it… because it doesn’t start fast enough for my taste.

And that’s what a lot of this boils down to: friction. In terms of software, friction is how much work does it take just to do the thing you want to do to begin with. That’s the problem, I guess, is all this friction.

With all the addition of LLMs and AI, nerds now just got the biggest new chew toy to play with… but here’s the rub, you just added WHOLE nothing headache to the daily mix.

Forget the whole AI is a help to productivity, get back to me when you lost 3 hours on a Saturday, cause you didn’t know how ACP worked. (Pro tip: one ACP session per harness, or ouch time)

…

Like we as humans, now have so many layers to go through to do work…

• (Not including shelter, power, internet) … sad to say, they ARE a privilage.
• Computer turn on?
• OS not busted
• Slack busted?
• Auth need to update?
• Email full?
• Ok… let’s open up Jetbrains …
• Plugin update… nope
• Agent update…yes … reload
• LSP server good?
• Oh, wrong dir
• Oh Git branch drifted
• … and it’s bad…

… well fuck, there goes my day…

So I need to have all those things working just to be able to edit a text file. Kind of crazy. A simple harness like — I’d say Crush or Goose — hooked into OpenRouter, but nothing else, and no multiplexer. Just Fresh and Crush, two windows, one if your fancy. That’s easy, I guess?

Personal tech

Now for my personal stuff, yeah, that can work. But for work, when I’m doing a giant codebase and Terraform and all the better things, I need something more robust. Something that uses plugins like GitNexus for git indexing, memory system, remember everything that I ever wrote, also an integration with Obsidian, which adds all my notes.

I have this gigantic system built up just to be able to do my job. Kind of crazy. But we all can’t be relaxed Russian Blue cats.

And it gets to the point where you get so overloaded that you need to spend 15-20 minutes a day just sitting outside remembering how to breathe, because you’re so overloaded by all these tools and all this complexity on any given day. That kind of makes me wonder, was life always this hard? I don’t think so.

And that kind of makes me want to go back to simpler tools and things. But you can’t go back, that’s the problem. You can’t get rid of all of this, but you can slim it down.

TL;DR

So I’m going to be working on trying to standardize: one harness, one editor, one computer, one operating system. And I found decreasing friction that way tends to help. I had the same dotfiles-and-home-can-of-worms between my Linux boxes and my Windows, my Mac.

You don’t differentiate anymore, for that reason. The editors work the same across both. They’re all unified spaces, same environment, same shells, and everything. And that lack of differentiation, that sameness between platforms, makes my life a lot easier, so I don’t have to think as much. And it’s the same setups everywhere. Which is why on servers, for example, I use Fish as a shell, not Zsh. On desktops it just works. So I use Crush, and I use Micro. Very simple. Because the servers, we’re working on day to day, I just need them to work, to be able to edit a few simple config files.

And that’s the real goal: trying to keep it simple, trying as hard as you can to make it simple.

So I’m going to work on standardizing even my agent. So one harness. You can also have multiple providers for routing, for saving money, because tokens cost money. So right now I’m demoing 9Router, but I used to use Bifrost. But there’s also Headroom. So now you see you have all these different options and all these different ways you can save money, and it adds complexity to save money.

…

If I didn’t want to save money, I could just run straight into an LLM provider, no gateway, just pay. And sometimes it’s worth it. You pay and run DeepSeek Flash, you know, still pretty cheap, pay the money, don’t have to deal with anything. But tell that to me spending 15, 20, 30 days of my life managing it. You know?

So, we’ll see. This is a rough draft; of life… next chapter please.

TL;DR …

This article is a part of the series "tools".

Other articles in the series:

• Review - AI Tooling 4 min read
• How to setup ZSH LLM Autocomplete 6 min read
• Obsidian’s Agent Era 1 min read
• Tool Fatigue 6 min read