I stopped trying to find the one perfect AI coding agent.

For about six months I bounced between tools — one was great at planning, another wrote

cleaner diffs, a third caught bugs the first two confidently shipped. Switching between them

meant copy-pasting context all day, and I was the only thing holding the workflow together.

So I flipped it around. Instead of picking one agent, I now run three at once , each doing

the job it's actually good at. This is the setup that finally stuck.

The three roles

I don't think of them as "tools" anymore. I think of them as a small team with three roles:

The Planner — reads the issue, explores the codebase, and writes a step-by-step plan. No code yet. Its only job is to be right about what to do.

The Implementer — takes the plan and writes the actual diff. It's fast and literal, which is exactly what you want once the thinking is done.

The Reviewer — never sees the plan.…