AI / LLM

Development

GitHub CoPilot

I’ve started using GitHub Copilot in VS Code, testing it for building small utility plugins, creating WordPress functions, and building small sites using different frameworks. It integrates well with what I was already using, and it has new features and cool things to try almost daily. I’m using Claude Haiku 4.5 as my base model, occasionally bringing in Claude Opus 4.6 for more complex tasks.

I’m working on a WordPress plugin now, so I’m testing a workflow where I use GPT 5.3 Codex to do the main build, then use Haiku for the documentation and UX/UI work (which can be very iterative). I’ll use Opus for the final polish. We’ll see how it goes.

Cline

Before I moved to GitHub CoPilot, I was a Cline user. I still think it’s great and go back to it occasionally. I still love to test local models, and Cline is great for pulling those in from LM Studio or Ollama and making them agentic. I’ve had some okay luck with Gemma 3, Devstral and Qwen 3 coder locally. The experience here is getting much better, particularly with Qwen.

As an aside, I’ve recently been testing AI plugins for Obsidian. I don’t love them so far, but what I have had some luck with is opening my Obsidian Vault as a folder / project in VS Code, then running Cline connected to a small model like Liquid through LM Studio to essentially chat with my Vault. This allows me to pull a lot of different data from my own notes without adding another plugin to Obsidian.

Perplexity and General CoPilot

These I use for general dev chats, just to keep them separate from projects I’m working on inside VS Code. I’ve also found that Perplexity is pretty good at helping me with invoicing, although it tends to vastly overestimate certain time expenditures. I’ll write more about my experiences with that at some point.

Gemini Cli

This is pretty new as of this writing, so I’ve only gotten to use it a little. It’s pretty good, I have to say. I think this fits into my workflow in an odd way. See, sometimes I want to work on an idea I’m having or quickly fix a thing I just noticed in a project I’m not really working on currently. I can open up a terminal in whatever directory I’m in, and immediately get to work on a thing without setting up a new project, environment or etc. That has value… I think. As I say, I haven’t had much time to test it, but it looks promising.

Illustration

Okay, this one is tricky. There are a lot of very valid concerns when it comes to generative AI in creating artwork. I don’t have a lot of need for AI in my illustration currently, but I have been experimenting on using it for ideation, color balancing and tools like generative fill for better cropping… things like that. I’ve also been experimenting on training AI (through LoRAs) to use my own artwork to ink my own art using my own style. Is that ethical? I dunno man. It’s a complicated, messy world… but still amazing.

ComfyUI

This is my AI image generator / editor of choice for now. It works really well on my local machine with just 12g of VRAM. I chose this over Invoke on the strength of Qwen Image Edit, which as of this writing only works in Comfy (it’s pretty great). I still use Invoke for anything involving Pony.

Affinity

Affinity Photo and Designer are my current choices for illustration work. They’ve recently added a few AI features that I’ve played with a bit. I had thought that Affinity would be adding tools similar to what they have at LeonardoAI, since they were both acquired by Canva, but I haven’t seen that happen yet.

Update: Affinity combined their apps into one application and made it free… less than a year after I purchased the suite. Nice. Anyway, they’re doing a whole subscription thing through Canva for their AI features, which are not particularly compelling to me at the moment. We’ll see what they roll out in the coming weeks, though.