AI model choices 2026-06

My 2026 Jan AI tool stack.

Six months since my last post and the whole list has turned over.

Models ###

• Kimi 2.6 has become my overall workhorse model. By default I start most AI sessions with Kimi 2.6 now.
• GPT 5.5 remains my coding model of choice. My detailed planning, creating of exec-plans¹, code review, simplification, and one-shot feature changes, reliably happen with GPT 5.5 (high).
• Opus 4.8 for deep thinking, writing and overall hard tasks. It’s been four days since the release, so my opinion is still forming but I’ve been fascinated how quickly Opus 4.8 is giving me the right solutions, especially for the slightly more complex problems. - I still only reach out to, when other models are struggling, cause 💸🔥
• Gemini for anything image, video, or audio. Nothing else is close. It has collapsed work that used to eat hours² of mine.

Harness ###

I constantly try multiple harnesses but I think I’ve firmly settled on OpenCode paired with OpenChamber as my harness of choice. Stay tuned for a future post on power tips for OpenCode, but I put a lot of these harnesses through the ringer and am really happy with this combo atm.

I still drop often into TUI land with OpenCode and while like others I had my dalliance with cmux, I’ve found it’s not great on performance and runs into memory issues. So I’m back to naked Ghostty. OpenCode on the other hand is really good at managin sessions, so often I don’t even find myself needing to use tmux.

Also, I use Hermes but having discovered OpenChambers, I don’t find myself needing to reach as often. Again, this deserves a longer post, if you’re curious.

What surprised me ###

I’ve just been blow away by Kimi 2.6. I’ve found it often keeps pace with GPT 5.5 with Medium reasoning. There have even been time it’s results matched Opus 4.8 (though Opus typically gets the results one-shot). I’m not sure if I’ve engineered my harness in some way to work better with Kimi, but dang I love the results I’m getting. If you want to give it a shot, I recommend Opencode’s $10 “Go” plan and push Kimi 2.6 hard.

I don’t use any of the models as therapits/friends to have conversations and I typically have a heavy handed instruction on how it should communicate with me, so a lot of the complaints around Opus 4.8 being “rough” or GPT 5.5 being soul-less 🙄, don’t bother me as much.