I'm a solo dev and I've been trying to get these free AI coding tools to actually work for me. To be honest, it's been a huge pain. I kept running into problems: Kilo Code would break my files, and Gemini CLI was so slow I could make coffee while waiting for it to finish a simple task. I was getting really frustrated and felt like I was wasting more time than I was saving. This post is basically my lab notebook from the past few weeks. I stumbled upon a workflow that combines a web UI for the "thinking" part and a fast CLI for the "doing" part. It's the first thing that's felt genuinely useful. I was pretty surprised when I timed it and it was about 6x faster than just using Gemini CLI on its own. I wrote down everything I learned, hoping it might help someone else who's also struggling with these tools. Curious to hear what you all think!