This series has been building upon the analogy of the Renaissance workshop as the guide to describe my personal AI agentic system. A studio of capable machines.
At the time, it seemed like the perfect metaphor for a setup that aims to provide leverage and let an individual’s judgment, taste and point of view govern more work than one person’s hands could handle.
This piece, the last of the pack, couldn’t break the pattern.
In the first article, I promised to honor the wall of small tools that didn’t make it into history books. Those that remember the finished canvases, the frescoes and the altarpieces.
They forget the rag that cleaned the brush, the string that held the line and the jars that kept the mixtures. None of them made the works but, without them, the experience to compose would have been quite miserable.
In a more practical sense, what follows is the depiction of the software and tools that make this custom agentic setup pleasant to use, and make the experience of interacting with an army of agents fast, easy and practical.
Now, this is my wall, and you will notice it is rather small. Agents have their own, much larger one. What we called their harness.
At different moments in the series, I’ve argued that the best platform for your own team of agents is a tool marketed to developers: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode.
In the last two months, we have seen the rise of the personal agent product category. The labs launched Grok Bot from xAI in August, Muse from Meta in September and dots from OpenAI a few weeks later. Some startups have ventured into the field too. Instinct, the most prominent of all, has no app: you text or call it.
These products are easy to use, feature excellent UIs, and will continue to improve, becoming the primary gateway for bringing AI agents to the masses (Muse passed five million downloads in 22 days).
However, for AI power users - like you - Claude Code and Codex will continue to be the most stable, flexible, powerful and well-engineered base to build your own agentic workshop.
The launch coverage of these products recognized that “much of this functionality was already possible through Codex and similar agentic harnesses.” And Dan Shipper, who uses dots daily, wrote:
I use Dot for my day-to-day work, but sometimes I want to go back to good old reliable Codex. - Dan Shipper
Welcome to The Workshop Series, Part 4. The tool wall starts where the agents’ harness lives.
1. The IDE
For Claude Code or Codex as the platform, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the natural workspace to interact with agents, navigate projects, run commands, inspect errors and edit files. It’s your agentic command center.
Mine is Visual Studio Code.
Not very original, but I choose it because it is flexible enough to adapt to almost any kind of work. It has a huge ecosystem of extensions, plugins and themes, supported by a large developer community, and that allows me to shape it around my own workflows instead of the other way around.
It is also particularly robust for remote work. When at the desktop, it has become the main entry point to my server-based house of agents.
Some add-ons I recommend if you decide to mirror this: Prettier (formatting on save), GitLens (who changed a line, and when), Pylance and Python, Tidy Paste (clean pastes) and vscode-pdf (PDFs without leaving the editor). For a pleasant visual experience, the One Monokai theme.
2. Terminal tools
My agents now search, browse, edit, delete and create files for me. But I need something to see them, assign work, respond and coordinate them.
That is still Herdr, the terminal multiplexer I highlighted: one window, many agents, and a sidebar that tells me which one needs me.
A possible answer to the coordination tax of many agents, and to what Kieran Klaassen (from Every) described: “It worked when I had five agents. At 10, I started forgetting.”
It is great because it survives reboots (agents included), it has a phone layout and, with plugins, you can expand its functionality. Yazi for file trees in a popup or micro, a simple text editor that accepts mouse and touch.
Other tools I use in the terminal include oh-my-zsh (gives the shell a prompt that shows the folder and git branch at a glance), lazygit (turns git into a visual panel of single keystrokes) and lazydocker (which puts all your containers on one keyboard-driven screen).
The rest of the command line is the agents’ wall, not mine. Including now, their own computer: a separate, locked user on the server runs a virtual desktop with basic software and a web browser on a persistent profile.
Command-line tools, as Andrej Karpathy put it, are what agents “can natively and easily use.”
3. Dictation
A spoken set of instructions runs far longer than a typed one, and agents do better work with more context.
Use voice dictation. You speak 3x faster than you type, and your prompts get way more detailed as a result. - Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code
I use Monologue, a competitor to the seemingly omnipresent Wispr Flow, on the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad. Essentially everywhere.
It just works, and it has a very cool retro look. Honestly, though, I use it because it comes with my Every subscription (highly recommended for the writing alone).
How this still is a product category is beyond my comprehension, as one would assume that Apple or Google should have already built it as just a well-crafted feature. But it is what it is, and these tools, with their purpose-built models, are still ahead.
4. The Claude app
I use the Claude iOS app a lot, but rarely its Chat or Cowork screens.
My usual flow is ccr build-financial-model on the server. That names the session, gives its prompt box a color (so eight parallel agents are easy to tell apart) and turns on Remote Control. The session then appears instantly in the app’s Code view, under the same name, with a green dot.
From there, the phone works like any chatbot but with my custom agentic army on the other side, including their access to all the tooling, context, memories and workflows.
Cat Wu - from the Claude Code team - described colleagues who, every night, “plug their laptop into a power charger, open a bunch of remote control sessions, lock the screen, and then use their mobile phone from their couch.” My server is that laptop, minus the charger.
5. Other models
At work, next to Claude Code (by far the most used) and Microsoft Copilot, Visa’s GenAI platform serves as the gateway for a rich array of models.
The personal version of this, on the always-on server, is OpenRouter: one account, more than 500 models from over 80 providers. On top of it, I built Plenum, a custom plugin that lets Claude Code ask any of them, delegate work, or convene a council where they rank each other’s answers.
Claude Opus 5.5 stays the default, both because it is an awesome model and because the subscription subsidizes its use generously. Plenum is there to experiment, benchmark, compare and - also - for images, videos and audio.
That’s Rent the Frontier, Own the Stack at personal scale. The models are rented and swappable. The harness, the server and the library are mine.
Closing the loop
Five layers, five pieces: the assistants, the bench, the building, the library.
And now, the tool wall that makes the five principles that kicked off this series real:
Always-on: Herdr brings the agents back after a restart, and the timers run while I sleep.
Accessible everywhere: VS Code at the desk, Termius on the sofa, the Claude app on a coffee break.
Composable: the agents’ wall of command-line tools, and any lab’s model through OpenRouter.
Portable: the commands live in the bench, so a rebuilt box gets them back.
Robust: hooks at every gate, and a locked user for the agents’ browser.
I’m aware the market is moving the other way, toward friendly apps and message threads, and that a black terminal with white text over it still intimidates most people. A year from now, half of this wall may fit inside one app on my phone. For now, I’d rather pay the tax of a custom system.
Before you leave...
If you want any piece of this setup (the
ccrfunction, the Herdr config, the hooks), drop me a message.And tell me: what small tools and light software make your tech life more pleasant and your work easier?
I publish a post a week on key ideas around AI, Agents and everything around their diffusion into the enterprise and people’s lives. You can read them all here.