I been working and making things with AI agents since Windsurf days, here's what works for me after experimenting and working for a while with these things. As far as the agent goes I find whatever the latest OpenAI model is out worked best for me. This company has burned me the least and I like the models. I tried many but consistency of OpenAI models cant be beat IMO. Though we are post honeymoon phase now I feel like so I am now experimenting with cheaper alternatives like Deepseek 4.1 flash and so on. I don't trust Anthropic as the downgrade my models consistently and its rare i get to use what I pay for. I wont even get in to discussing Google agents for obvious reasons, grok I never used though Grok bot looks interesting.

For skills I make my own, but most important is the custom setup i have. Voice is how I use all of my agents. I have an extremely well optimized voice setup that i custom built so I can talk to my agents and also hear them. The voice stack itself is very low latency and high quality. asr (parakeet v3), tts (omnivoice) take no more then 400-450 ms total as far as latency budget is concerned, rest is on the agents actual decode speed. IMO this setup is crucial for all antigenic work, i can express myself a lot better with speech and also give a lot more context and nuance with voice, i rarely type. I still look at the terminal window because my agent knows to keep the technical details in text form versus barfing them at my voice channel, plus terminal gives me lots of other important data about the agents direction and what hes doing, nothing custom here though. I cant emphesise how important voice is though, it has to be practiced to really understand.

As the models got better I now trust them with longer and longer tasks though I still don't use /goal feature as it has never worked out well for me. Theres no need for micromanagement any more but you still need to be there to steer the ship somewhat. BTW, codex cli compaction is garbage so I made my own custom implementation that works a lot better and allows the thread to be used indefinitely without issues. I strongly suggest everyone makes a new thread after extensive use if you havent made your own implementation.

Theres about a billion other things I could get in to like subagents, cohort groups, orchestration layers, etc... But this is a good start imo.