GoKawiilApril 6, 2026 · 7 min read
TL;DR Instead of $100/month for Claude, pay $10/month for Zed editor and set up a monthly $90 top up to OpenRouter. You can use the Zed Agent harness or keep using Claude Code, however you pay API costs for what you use. When you’re not using, your credits build up rather than missing the usage window.
I’ve been disappointed to feel that I’m hitting Claude limits faster than before. For context, I use both Claude Code and the Claude desktop app for work and pay $100/month for the privilege of hitting limits. I’m not the only one (this was AMD’s senior director of AI) with numerous other reports found over Reddit and Twitter.
This article is how I’m reallocating that spend to other tools and models while getting more flexibility at the same time.
Picking an Agent Harness and Exploring other models
I like options and while Opus is undoubtedly the market leader for agentic coding, there are other models that I like to use to balance cost and speed depending on the complexity of the task in hand. I’m looking at how I can use different models with an Agent Harness.
verbose output An “agent harness” coordinates sending and receiving messages from LLMs, injecting tool defintions and calling the tools and orchestrating all of this into workflows (including retrying failing tasks). Claude Code is an example of such a system. It takes the user message, coordinates reading/writing files - among other things - and makes calls to the LLM.
Zed and OpenRouter
Plans: $10 / month - pricing page
You don’t realise how slow/laggy VSCode and the all of the forks are until you try out Zed . The builtin agent harness is basic but nice with the ability to follow the agent around as it modifies files and to add new profiles to customise the agent behaviour. Like Cursor it shows the context usage and the rules that are being applied to the current session. If you continue to use Claude Code or other tools like Mistral Vibe, Zed integrates them directly into the editor using the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) - see supported agents .
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