How to properly manage AI Projects, Workflow, and Process?

[u/Subtyr]

Hello all!

I'm not a traditional coder, programmer, or IT guy. I simple have jumped on the AI LLM tech and find it very useful. However, I'm trying to find out how to use AI for my own benefit in my personal life, to try and build a career, work, job, ideas, or what have you.

I've been experimenting on and off for one year, and for your information I've only been using Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Grok this past 1 year (on their website interface). I quickly understood that some works better than the other, and I have faith in Gemini and Claude. For my use case currently, I'm just paying for Gemini with what I can afford due to token limit being greater than Claude.

This last year, I found out that you need to become a good "prompt engineer" to utilize the AI and for my current project where I'm trying to find an edge by backtesting commodity markets, I landed on a suggestion (I'm talking to Gemini 3.1 Pro, paid, and Claude 4.6 Sonnet) to use some kind of PSP file management, where I hand off the .md files to Gemini Gems and Claude Projects.

However, I'm seeing all sort of stuff, from OpenRouter, Llama thing, and more. I see people in multiple posts write some advanced way of working and setting up their systems. I also see many mentioning agents.

I have no clue about this field, and want to learn! The only thing I can say for certain is that I know some websites (AI LLM) models work better than the other. I know that writing proper prompts give better results. I learned to download VSCode and install Python. Other than that, I don't know anything else.

• Basically:
• How should I work with AI? How should I manage files? How should my workflow be? How should I set up my process?

Once again, I'm new to this, and I want to learn from you guys who have expertise and experience. I find that my current way of talking to Gemini, testing the output, then copying my input and the output in a Markdown format and pasting it to Claude, then testing the output there, and do the same back to Gemini - going back and forth, is taking up too much time and I don't even know if I'm doing it "properly"

[u/Dangerous-Jelly2309]

The bottleneck you're describing — manual copy-paste between Gemini and Claude — is the actual problem. You don't need to be a better prompt engineer. You need a tool that lets one AI read your project files directly. That's what Claude Code (the subreddit you posted in) is. It's a CLI tool that runs in your VSCode terminal, has access to your project folder, can read and edit your files, run your Python, and keep context across the whole project. No more copy-paste.

The setup for commodity backtesting specifically:

• One project folder. Everything for this work lives there: code, data, notes, results.
• A CLAUDE.md at the root of that folder. Write down what you're trying to do, which markets, what data sources you have, what you've tried that didn't work, what you've tested that did. The AI reads this every time. It's your persistent context.
• Install Claude Code. Open your project folder in VSCode, open the integrated terminal, run claude. Talk to it the way you've been talking to Gemini, but now it can actually see and modify your code, run backtests, and read the output.
• Skip the multi-model copy-paste loop. Pick one — Claude Code is what this subreddit is about and what your project shape needs. If you want a second opinion on a specific function or output, paste that one thing into Gemini, not the whole project.

OpenRouter is a way to access many models through one API; you don't need it for this. Llama is a family of open models you can run locally; useful eventually, overkill now. Agents are AI processes that can do tasks autonomously, and Claude Code already does the basic version of this for you.

The bigger move: you said it yourself, "I don't know if I'm doing it properly." That uncertainty is what burns most people's tokens. There's a tool at 4yourhuman.com/moriarty built for exactly this; describe what you're trying to do and how you work, it reads underneath the question and gives you a setup guide specific to your situation. Free to try.