So far in 2026, for every hour that passes there is a new LLM workflow or agent toolkit that is pitched as the one. I can’t even begin to claim coming up with a novel approach that does this but I think it’s worth documenting my journey in testing them as I build with a limited budget (Claude and Gemini Pro subs) and limited usage limits.
Trials
I started off with a simple PRD.md, Task_Plan.md and a technical_spec.md flow but Claude struggled to keep up with context as projects grew in size in between sessions.
Conductor seemed like a good choice to wrangle with Gemini 2.5 Pros’s poor long context retrieval but I was quickly hitting token limits as the as the state file got bigger. Conductor-beads (inspired by beads) seemed like a quick solution to handle this. It determined which fragments of context were required for the current task and fetches them.
This still felt too spec driven for general use, I wanted a flow with a persona that would pause and let me explore options, push back while making good use of agent skills. r/ClaudeAI and HN is flooded with new variants every day. Ralph loop implementations (requires an big budget), 'Get Shit Done' (resource-intensive with sub-agent swarms) and something about a mayor and gas town that I don’t even want to bother looking up.
Next time, I dropped beads and split the workflow into two core personas: A ‘CTO’ persona that does a few key things:
- Manage Linear tickets and memory via Linear-Cli
- Writes detailed specs to hand off
- Capture workflow and tool lapses during code execution
- Confers UX designer and Eng Lead personas which discuss, debate on user asks during research phases and planning phases.
And a Claude Code Senior Engineer persona that implements the specs using red-green TDD. This role separation helped me parallelise work and optimise for context length and states.
Getting hooked
At this point I was quite familiar with setting up hooks and more convinced that CC could plan better and faster than Gemini 2.5 Pro with the right toolset. Inspired by ECC which is a more complete multi-agent toolkit, I updated my workflow to be a distilled version of ECC, implemented my hooks to trigger session level memory persistence, guided compaction and pre and post tool uses. I also integrated building.md Since everything is now handled by one model, I was able to planning and implementing in the same session thanks to
The workflow in simplified terms was now managed by commands:
- Freeform explore
- A custom /plan mode that utilises existing state data
- Ticket generation in a chosen issue tracking tool
- /tdd ’ticket name’ to implement
- Optional - /code-review to assess entire project or /handoff to generate handoff context for a new session or another agent.
Why don’t I use subagents in my workflows already? It’s definitely more useful when I have a big budget and I like to see CC go wild with it but unfortunately, I am limited to the Pro subscriptions for now.
My latest project ClickSheet was built using this system. I've been thinking of setting up a more robust harness based on this in hopes of making the most of the gemini pro subscription I have access to.