Top
Best
New

Posted by eggbrain 1 day ago

Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?

I'm curious how people on HN are using AI day to day, and came up with a list of questions I thought could be interesting to know. No need to answer every question of course, just wanted to get a gut feel how people are using AI.

1) What AI subscriptions are you personally paying for? (Claude, ChatGPT/Codex, Cursor, etc)

- Which tiers?

- Have you purchased multiple subscriptions from the same provider (eg two Claude accounts)?

2) Are you using models outside (or instead) of those subscriptions? For example, pay-as-you-go APIs, OpenRouter, or locally hosted models.

- Which models and providers?

3) What coding harnesses and interfaces are you using? Are you sticking with the default CLIs or IDE integrations, or using alternatives like OpenCode, Pi, Aider, Muse Code, or custom-built harnesses?

- What made you switch harnesses (if you switched)?

4) Are you using any agent orchestration or swarm tools?

- For example, Munder Difflin, Gas Town, Ruflo, or something custom.

5) Are you using broader agent platforms like OpenClaw / Hermes Agent / Grok bot / Dots / Muse?

- If you are using them, what are your main use cases?

-----

I know my workflow has differed significantly from a year ago, and so it would be interesting to capture a snapshot today of what people are using and why.

492 points | 598 commentspage 10
lgunsch 7 hours ago|
The somewhat novel part of my workflow, is after Claude has built something out, I have a second fresh Claude session review the code with a set of 16 custom questions. I've discovered that giving Claude questions to ask during code review improves things quite a bit. The questions mirror the exact things I would have asked myself about a pull request when reviewing it. I found this to be a real game changer.

The code comes out quite a bit better, and I would suspect that it uses less tokens in the long run. Simpler cleaner code I would suspect uses less tokens.

a-saleh 12 hours ago||
Subscriptions: Personal: Claude Pro 20$/mo Work: we have access to some Anthropic and OpenAI models and open-weight models, like GLM

Outside: I have some open weight locally on my 64G ram M5 macbook, mostly for personal stuff that I don't want to send to cloud (or claude). Mostly using Gemma through oMLX, because it feels more street-smart than the more coding focused models, experimenting with Qwen-flash-next through Strata, because the streaming of experts really pushes what size of model I can run

Harness: Claude code, mostly, I trust anthropic, and like the remote integration with their mobile app. Being able to say "prototype me this and that ui" for personal project and seeing it and testing it on my phone is awesome.

At work for the api-provided llms, I am trialing opencode and pi harness, but don't have much to say, we mostly used claude-code up til now.

For local I mostly use Hermes, not for any of the big features, just because I want a nice chat interface (I am mostly talking through my health problems and trying to get my appointments in order) that already has basic tooling integrations out of the box. I.e. getting OpenWebUI have search tool was pain. Adding i.e. mcp for my todolist or calendar to Hermes was smooth.

tegeek 8 hours ago||
I've Kiro and Antigravity installed both are vs code but forked by Amazon and Google and brought their multi agentic coding environments. Then I installed Claude extention on both. I follow spec-driven approach (https://kiro.dev/docs/specs/) all agents are instructed to follow it strictly. When I plan sometimes I evalute all specs with Kiro, Gemini and Cluade. Each has their share of work and improvements, each spec in my case end up as requirments, design and tasks.md files. Most of the code is generated by Claude and Gemini Argon and its pretty solid.
Teyott 8 hours ago||
I have a wierd approach to how I use AI... Unfortunately, I don't use any AI Agent, I use the free versions of all these AI for my personal use and research. they do a good job in explaining stuff. I have my personal team to work on several tasks instead of AI Agents. What I feel is that AI can never replace a human instinct. I might be wrong too!

All my codework and projects are built without any use of AI.

Haa, and once I had to use a Google AI API to integrate in one of my Projects... That's the only time I used it as an API!

If anyone feels that my approach is wrong or I should use any, please suggest me a good one!

mgiampapa 20 hours ago||
1) Claude Pro $20/mo (I'm retired now and just playing on personal projects)

2) I have API usage via Together for a number of toys I have built for my kid, I probably could refactor this but it predates getting a Claude Pro subscription.

3) Claude Code letting it do the work, pure vibes and dropping to vstudio as needed.

4) No

5) Muse, I have it doing things like basic research, waiting on ticket windows and just being a personal assistant. It also does a really good job at scraping churning forums and blogs and has made a few thousand dollars in the last month just on bank and brokerage bonuses. It does all the record keeping and I just sanity check the dates, hold periods and do the account opening / transfer work. I'm eager to see Anthropic's take on this space and hope it uses the same Chrome integration. Muse's biggest flaw is that it runs it's browser actions from a datacenter instead of a local host and a real browser.

Kuyawa 19 hours ago|
Being retired in the age of AI is the best, all the time in the world to play with what really interests us plus an incredible assistant to squeeze every optimization path to productivity. Apps developed in minutes instead of months is like adding another century to our lives. And we are just starting...
rufugee 6 hours ago||
I've built a web-based control room for a single developer to run multiple agents from multiple vendors behind a single pane of glass. It keeps the record of every session, puts whatever needs you in one queue, gives each new session the context it needs, and shows you what got done while you were away. Completely vibe-coded (Ruby on Rails), but very productive.
jasondigitized 4 hours ago||
Keeping it simple. Codex and Claude on my Mac. CLI and MCP/Connectores, File Reader and Browser are all built in. And they are both getting better everyday.
gszr 7 hours ago||
I use xAI and OpenAI subscriptions, switching between them, even mid session, using my Lunar harness: https://github.com/gszr/lunar. This is a very productive setup for me. As it also supports API keys, I throw in other models in the mix when I want to play around. I have not incorporated an orchestrator in my workflow, but I can see the appeal.
voodooEntity 12 hours ago||
For me the answer is twofold.

Regarding commercial solutions:

- Subscription: Google AI Ultra (testing for 1 month rn to see what i can get out of argon, after that probably going back to Pro package)

- Harness: Antigravity IDE : from what i have tested on commercial harnesses this one i liked the most so far

Regarding selfhosted solutions:

- Inference host: Im owning a 5090 and im running the models locally - mostly use qwen 3.8 27b q5 atm, its a bit "slower" even on a 5090 but it fits the vram i have available while also being quite good in terms of result quality

- Harness: I tested alot and ended up writing my own harness ( https://github.com/laughingmandev/loa ) since none of the ones i tested (yes i tested openhands, hermes, etc...) did work well for me. While my own harness still needs some enhancements, its especially made for long running / complex tasks while beeing hands off (not permanently prompt jokey'ing ) and sturdy enaugh to work well with selfhosted/local run inference.

I use the gemini4argon/google agent atm to work on a c++ simulation and image asset generation for a game im working on. The complexity of this stuff just is to big for a local qwen 3.8 to fully grasp (its not that good at c++ either). Local image diffusion also is not that great.

For other stuff of low to medium complexity im working with my own agent/harness/setup - especially if the data is anyhow security relevant since im not leaking anything outside. From writing scripts/tools to analyzing infrastructure or discussing architecture.

gabriel-uribe 10 hours ago|
1) Claude x1 $100, Codex x1 $100, Cursor x1 $20 (adversarial review), OpenCode Go x1 $10

2) I have a locally hosted Qwen model setup, but I only use that when I'm offline which is rare (eg long flight)

3) Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor (most rare now). I use default IDEs generally. I also run prompts from my phone via connected Codex/Claude iOS apps.

4) Just the native orchestration in CC/Codex (my larger projects include subagent prompts)

5) Atm, just OpenAI's dot. I used OpenClaw for about a month 6 months ago, but realized that the features would be done & better by the labs, so gave up and ported my work to Claude Cowork at the time.

Main use case is orchestration for my life & my projects. Manages email, tracks todos/deadlines. I could see the use cases growing with time as they add integrations + I trust it more.

More comments...