I don't code alone anymore. And I don't mean I have a co-founder. I mean I have a fleet — a stack of AI agents, a memory system that never forgets, and a routing layer that decides who does what, when, and with what context.
Here's how it actually works.
The Foundation: Pieces OS Is My Brain
Everything starts with Pieces OS. It's not just a snippet manager. It's my long-term memory graph. Every clipboard event, every screenshot OCR, every browser tab, every Codex session, every ChatGPT conversation — Pieces captures it, indexes it, and makes it searchable.
This matters because context is everything. When I open a project I haven't touched in 3 weeks, I don't have to remember where I left off. I ask my system to pull a morning brief, and it synthesizes:
- What I accomplished yesterday
- Open errors and failed builds
- Active apps and running projects
- 2–3 next actions ranked by priority
I didn't build this from scratch. Pieces OS already does the heavy lifting. I just wired it into my orchestration layer.
The Routing Layer: Lapapi — My Personal Mission Control
Lapapi is the hub. Think of it as my own lightweight AI workspace — a macOS-first dashboard that connects to Pieces, Ollama, Codex, and whatever model I need.
Every morning, Lapapi runs a health check:
- Connector status (Pieces OS, Tailscale, GitHub, Ollama)
- Active project folders for dirty git states
- Downloads folder for accumulated clutter
- System memory pressure (I've hit 93% swap before — now I catch it early)
If something's wrong, it tells me. If everything's green, it gets out of the way.
Codex: The Builder Agent
Codex is where the real work happens. I use it as my primary code agent — not just for quick snippets, but for full project scaffolding, refactoring, and deployment.
Here's my actual Codex project dashboard right now:
- Kika-projects-report-hub: Automated project reports
- Mini-apps: Status menu, icon cropper, PNG tools
- AGENTS.md: Living documentation for my agent fleet
I recently made a big pivot: I removed Claude completely from my local-first tooling stack. My apps now only track what matters: Pieces, Ollama, Apple's local AI capabilities, and Codex project context. Build passed. App relaunched. No regrets.
Codex gets context from Pieces OS, so it knows my recent work without me copy-pasting. It reads my workstream summaries, checks my active window titles, and pulls relevant files. That's not magic — that's just good plumbing.
The Agent Fleet: Specialization Over Generalization
I don't use one AI for everything. I use agents — specialized personas with specific skills:
- Hermes. Gateway — Telegram & Discord dispatch, cron jobs, infrastructure.
- Kartie. Code review, architecture decisions, system diagnostics.
- Neve-02. Creative tasks, brand assets, Jez V marketing.
- Codex. Code generation, project scaffolding, deployment.
- Goose. Local inference, Ollama model management, extensions.
Each agent gets primed with skills — documented at agentskills.io — so they don't waste tokens discovering tool names. They already know: ollama run, codex --model, eagle-mcp search.
ChatGPT: The Strategic Layer
So where does ChatGPT fit? It's my strategic partner.
When I'm architecting something new — a design system, a business model, a brand pivot — I go to ChatGPT. It has the broadest context window and the deepest reasoning. I use it for:
- Design system philosophy (my V8V brand shop, the "less or more" aesthetic)
- High-level product decisions
- Marketing copy and brand voice
- Shopify storefront strategy
ChatGPT is where I think. Codex is where I build. Pieces remembers everything.
The Daily Flow: An Actual Example
Here's what a real day looks like:
- Morning brief (Lapapi + Pieces) → "Yesterday you refactored the UI, worked on V8V storefront, and hit a swap crisis. Today: fix ShieldCheck error, publish Complete Collection product."
- Deep work (Codex) → I open a project, Codex reads AGENTS.md, README.md, and CONTEXT.md, then implements the next smallest useful feature. No prompting required.
- Creative sprint (ChatGPT + Lovart/GPT Image 2) → Design assets for Jez V, iterate on brand positioning, or draft Shopify product descriptions.
- Evening wrap (Pieces memory capture) → The entire day's context is saved. Tomorrow, any agent can pick up exactly where I left off.
Why This Works: Local-First Sovereignty
I'm obsessed with local-first. My M4 Max runs Ollama with qwen3.6:27b, gemma4:31b, nemotron3:33b. I don't need cloud APIs for most tasks. When I do use cloud (GPT-5, Claude), it's a conscious choice — not a default.
I removed MongoDB backends from apps and replaced them with local JSON + Tauri. I self-host my project dashboards. My skills collections are organized in a local directory that any agent can read.
The result: my workflow is fast, private, and resilient.
The Philosophy: Workflow Over Model
Here's what I've learned after running this system for months:
The model matters less than the workflow.
A mediocre model with perfect context routing beats a frontier model with zero memory. Pieces OS gives me the memory. Lapapi gives me the routing. Codex and ChatGPT give me the execution.
I don't chase the latest GPT release. I optimize the pipeline:
- How context flows from Pieces → agent
- How agents hand off work to each other
- How memory persists across sessions
That's where the real leverage is.
What's Next
I'm currently:
- Building V8V — a Shopify boutique for AI-agent skill bundles (28 curated collections for Codex, Claude, Cursor)
- Refining AppAudit — a macOS tool that audits installed apps and recommends keep/kill decisions using Ollama
- Standardizing my Codex-ready project structure — AGENTS.md, README.md, TASKS.md, DECISIONS.md, PROMPTS.md
If you're building with AI agents, my advice is simple: invest in memory and routing before you invest in better models. The model will change next month. Your workflow is what compounds.
From the same desk
The routing layer is the theory; the apps are what it ships. Small, calm, local-first macOS tools — built by this exact fleet.