My (Cheap) AI Workflows

Back in January, I figured: if AI can do it faster, why not?

Update (September 2026): The $6 VPS below no longer runs this workflow. It now handles deployments only. Everything here runs locally via Tailscale. See My agentic workflow in 2026 for the current stack.

To skip the fluff, here is my setup.

My setup #

• Opencode Go (using oh-my-opencode-slim)
• Paseo

Notable AI tools/extensions #

• rtk
• fff-mcp
• grill-me
• handoff
• caveman

Cost #

• Server (for paseo CLI so I'm not opening my laptop that often) ($6)
• Opencode Go ($10)

My smoking budget is dead because of this. I call that a win-win.

Models I use #

All cheap. I cannot even burn through my $10 sub each month. I use MiniMax M3 for the orchestrator, DeepSeek v4 Pro/Flash for everything else.

How I use it #

First, I set up my GitHub and GitLab API tokens (read-only) to read issues assigned to me. With Paseo, I schedule that as a daily task.

paseo schedule create \
  --cron "0 0 0 0" \
  --timezone UTC \
  --run-now \
  --name gitlab-issues-summarizer \
  --provider opencode/deepseek-v4-pro \
  --cwd ~/dev/my-app \
  "Fetch Issues that assigned to me using skills /gitlab-issues-summarizer"

It ranks my issues for the day and I pick them off in order. One-line issues get a worktree; the heavier ones need real context.

I skim it on my phone: there is a complexity/priority breakdown, so I pick the easy one first. While the AI is grinding, I read the PRD for the more complex task and figure out the business logic in my head: what it should look like, which existing functions I can reuse. So my prompts stay mostly technical.

I always review the diff. Paseo has a decent phone diff viewer, but on desktop I stick to Neovim.

That is the day to day. I use AI to search the codebase and ramp up on the platform and the business logic, because sometimes business requirements do not translate cleanly into code. How do you tell a PM that product search hits a denormalized table instead of joining row by row?

Paseo also has per-project config (lifecycle hooks, etc.), handy for spinning up worktrees without lifting a finger.

That is the whole setup. The killer feature: it runs on my phone. So I can “work” from anywhere with a signal: bus stops, queues, the dentist chair.

Server security #

How I keep my AI from doing something dumb and irreversible:

• Run the AI as a non-root user, no sudo
• Block destructive shell commands (rm -rf, force pushes) at the hook level
• Never expose the server publicly: I use Tailscale

Going cheaper #

Next: move from OpenCode Go to OpenCode Zen or OpenRouter pay-as-you-go pricing.

Drawbacks #

AI starts fresh every session, so I use a skill to gather context before it executes a fix or feature.