Posted by eggbrain 1 day ago
Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?
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?
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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.
- Harness : oh-my-pie
- Models : OpenAI $20 sub (mostly using Sol/Luna) + Deepseek + JEV
- Skills : Mostly Osmani's agent skills, ub-mode, agency skills for personas + custom stuff
I'm kinda reworking everything as the moment, I'm having issues with other people's workflows (whether it is Pokock, Osmani or Uncle Bob) even though there are bit I like and I'm still looking at how to balance quotas, thinking levels, velocity.
I use both Openrouter and OpenCode to get Kimi, GLM, big Qwen, etc, but not at great scale. I have a security product that consumes API tokens that I built against Opus 4 when that was the strongest available; when I get around to it I’ll likely shift it to prefer GLM or Kimi, slightly for cost but mostly for non-refusal.
I spend a lot of time in Claude Code because it’s the only Anthropic subscription-friendly harness. Additionally use OpenCode and codex. Not much time spent in pi these days. I used Aider before Claude Code’s beta. Claude Code’s plugin framework is pretty decent, so I tend to stand up a repo of custom plugins against every client repo I work with. It’s a nice efficiency layer for me up front and often grows into a bonus client deliverable after a couple months of refinement.
OpenClaw runs persistently, mostly for little calendar tasks and trying to mitigate my ADHD: energy level check-ins, redirects to use attention for things that matter. It orchestrates Hermes under the hood but I don’t interact with the latter directly.
I still mostly just use tmux directly and tell running sessions about each other, sending messages to each other via text files or send-keys/capture-pane. Herdr is installed but mostly unused. The GUI clients aren’t my thing; I’m a born console junkie.
What I really want to change next is pulling this all back into emacs.
2. I sometimes have questions I don't want to associate with my main account, I use duck.ai or chatgpt.com in a private tab. I also dabbled with self-hosting, but it's mostly curiosity, testing abliterated models, testing linux-amd integration etc.
3. Sticking to the defaults. My dayjob pays for Copilot, which means a Copilot plugin in IntelliJ
4. I haven't even looked into agent orchestration and swarms.
5. Not using agent platforms either.
2) No.
3) I mainly use Claude as my main, Pi (with ChatGPT) for any automations. I manage them all with herdr. I cd into a path, kick off a claude/codex/pi session, then kill the session and manage it from anywhere with iceghost. (https://github.com/sharkjets/iceghost)
4) Negative.
5) I tried openclaw but found it a waste of my already scarce tokens. :D I build my own runners when I need a loop or cron-based automation.
Claude code CLI, rotated with codex CLI (monkey patched to be able to message with Claude sessions over the Unix socket thingies).
Local ollama server running qwen and a bunch of other models.
I'm having an absolute blast!
My projects accumulate here: joemattie.com
I also have an OpenCode Go subscription, so I can keep an eye on the capabilities of the Chinese models.
Opus 5.5 medium for the vast majority of coding and code review tasks. I will sometimes save on tokens by dropping to sonnet if I have a well detailed plan built with opus.
I spend a lot of time on the design/architecture of features. These tasks are assisted by Gen AI but I still need to make a lot of corrections. It's my main bottleneck.
For orchestration and sandboxing I've used plain VMs (I have a make VM script which installs Claude in a fresh VM).
I've used Scion at work, which gave me a lot of ideas and got me excited about building a better orchestration, messaging, sandboxing and web UI thingy which I am currently working on (GitHub link in my profile).
My biggest pain point I wanted to address with my tooling is cleanly separating projects and accesses. I do a lot of web dev and sys admin stuff. I'm building Egzo so I can safely grant and monitor access to remote systems and cloud services and keep myself organized.
I get a lot of value from having an LLM to talk to LLMs for me. It can automatically set up adversarial reviews from other ecosystems, or just prompt the implementation LLM to adhere to certain standards. My goal is to have fewer touch points when implementing. I want to speech to text a paragraph or two giving "taste" to the process; everything else is just toil.