The tool market wants you subscribed to five assistants. Your workflow only has three jobs for them. Most “my stack is a mess” problems are not skill problems - they are overlap problems, and they cost you money and attention every day.

The three jobs

Every coding agent you can buy today is doing one of these:

  1. The interactive loop. You steer each change: completions, inline edits, diff review. The tool lives where you edit.
  2. The delegation loop. You hand over a whole task - brief in, verified result out. The tool lives where your code runs: a terminal, a sandbox, a CI job.
  3. The review layer. Suggestions arrive where work gets merged: pull requests, issues, code review comments.

A solo builder can cover all three with two tools: one editor-native assistant for the interactive loop, one terminal agent for delegation, with review folded into whichever one touches your PRs. Teams add a dedicated review layer because more people need the suggestions where they already look.

Three starter stacks

  • Starting out (0 $/month to learn): one freemium editor assistant. Learn to spec, review diffs, iterate. Adding a second tool now only adds confusion.
  • Shipping real projects: editor assistant + one terminal agent. The assistant keeps your daily flow fast; the agent takes the tasks you can describe end to end. They share the same repo and the same AGENTS.md, so nothing is locked in.
  • Team on GitHub flows: editor assistant for individuals + review-layer agents on PRs. Delegation comes later, once your test suite can vouch for merged work.

Decision rules before you add a tool

Run every candidate through these four questions. If it fails one, don’t add it.

  1. Which job does it do? If the answer is “the same one my current tool does, but smarter”, you are shopping, not solving.
  2. Can it read my conventions? No AGENTS.md or rules-file support means you re-teach it your repo every session.
  3. Can it verify its own work? A delegation tool that cannot run your tests is a suggestion machine.
  4. What does leaving cost? Prefer tools that work on plain repos and standard files. Your escape hatch is your leverage.

The two traps

  • Paying for overlap. Two chat assistants that both autocomplete the same file deliver zero combined value minus one subscription.
  • Tool-switching as procrastination. If output quality is the problem, the fix is almost always the brief, the context file or the test loop - not the logo. Switch tools when a job is uncovered, never when a result disappoints.

The takeaway

Decide the three jobs. Buy one tool per job. Put the money you save into the parts that transfer between every tool you will ever use: your spec habits, your AGENTS.md, and a test suite an agent can run.