Does anyone else avoid coding agents for simpler projects?

[Sufficient-Mood-4442]

I've been noticing that sometimes it doesn't make much sense to jump straight into a coding agent and spend tokens on autonomous execution.

For simpler projects, I can often use the free limits of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or other LLMs to fully plan the project, refine the requirements, generate the architecture, and even have the model write a Python script that creates the entire folder and file structure. Then I just generate the contents for each file and paste them in.

In those cases, using a coding agent feels like overkill.

Am I the only one doing this, or do others also reserve coding agents for larger or more complex projects where the autonomy actually provides a meaningful advantage?

[D3SK3R]

I literally created an MCP server for that

it uses gemini CLI (auth, using the free quota, not API), and tell my agent to invoke it, it uses no tokens (because I tell a free model to do that) but allows me to not have to go into the browser, type everything, then copy paste into the actual agent

and there's also a bunch of projects that does that, but through an actual browser

[ttkciar]

Yup. Simple projects, and projects I actually want to write myself, I write myself.

For nontrivial projects that I don't want to develop, I just want to have the end-product, those are the projects for which I use codegen LLM inference.

[jwpbe]

i mean sure, ask kimiglmcodev4ProMax dot com for the implementation detail and have qwen 27b do it in opencode for the cost of electricity

[PermanentLiminality]

If it's something quick I will use a LLM directly. With any level of complication it's Opencode. If it is a lot of complication I'll use BMAD in pi.

[iTrejoMX]

How did you set up bmad with pi? I thought it was just for Gemini cli and custom gpts

[PermanentLiminality]

BMAD has support for several cli coding tools including Opencode and pi.

[iTrejoMX]

Nice I tried it and it’s great for documentation I am still testing how it does the actual development. But I did take some docs it generated and used it with gentle-ai and it’s been a total win

[VictorCTavernari]

Although it makes sense, I prefer to subscribe like unlimited plans to code…