Tldr; just teach them to talk to Codex and show Pi to ambitious ones.
Raw Codex, both app and cli. On windows 11 which is horrible (sometimes in WSL, which sometimes crashes for no reason when I copy a lot of data around and somehow reverts contents of a mounted vhd virtual drive to previous state from long ago, after a crash). I'd love to switch to linux but I'm an avid gamer. I installed a linux on my old box though and some of my AI jobs run there. GPU there is two generations back but it still has 24GB of VRAM.
Bare Pi if I have a cool idea on how to extend the harness. I don't use any skill in Codex but I ask to create some for Pi to go with the extension for Pi I am building at any given moment.
I used to have a kanban skill for Codex (and others) to build large amount of features afk in a spec driven development manner, but recently Codex is doing fine without it. And the last time I used kanban it built diligently a completely wrong thing that I, it turned out, underspecified.
Zed if I'm really inclined to view any files. But basically it's my text file viewer because it's marginally faster than the modern Notepad.
About 5 different web browsers, because they all suck. All crammed with tabs going back months.
Language, whatever. I bounce around between Python, Rust, C#, TypeScript. Maybe I should try something exotic.
Gpt-5.5 xtra high, Glm-5.1 (not recently because it's not as good, I used to like Kilocode with it, in previous major version 5(?), most recent Kilocode is streamlined into mediocrity, although you can still intall old version). Gemma4 on local ollama for specific non-coding tasks. Openai api proxy connected to my Codex sub, for cases where Gemma4 doesn't do that well.
I'm having immense fun by making programs for ad hoc tasks like transcribing a conversation I had this morning in a language I barely know. Or extending my old program that searches proofs in domain of axiomtic logic. Or adding feature to a charting "app" I built few years ago I was too lazy to add back then. Those 3 I did just today.
I can conclude that Gpt-5.5 is a better developer than I ever was or even could ever be (in all aspects) after being a programmer for two decades and being considered pretty good by my peers.
When I need a prompt for something, I ask codex to write it. If results are unsatisfactory I ask it to tweak it. It works very well.
I do image generation with chatgpt-image-2 although I think I'll need to build some tooling around it at some point, like a basic photoshop, mostly LLM controlled. The model itself is not good in basic composing and keeping track of different versions of the same sub-image
Sometimes I go to chat.com and ask for deep research on some subject an put the result in my project dir for Codex to find and learn from.
I don't use skills or MCPs. I always --yolo.
I release nothing. Even if I build something that might have wider appeal, I firmly believe that anyone could build it as well. And effort needed to find what I built and check if it fits somebody's need exceeds the effort they would need to extend to build it themselves exaclty as they want it. That's my experience. Human accessible internet, including Google is 50% dead for me already. I delegate the drudgery of browsing it to Codex or chat.
All I do is mostly for my own amusement. I have as much fun with it as with playing games. Possibly even more.