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

Posted by eggbrain 1 day ago

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?

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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.

519 points | 640 commentspage 17

mf_kevintruong 23 hours ago|

I build my own coding agent : Spurcode https://github.com/getspur/SpurCode which enable to support me to orchestrate difference other coding agent : like Codex + claude/Goose ...etc

Also : give out product agent notebook workbench : https://getspur.dev/spurlab to make all coding agent need to explore/grouding before coding with notebook

mickeyp 1 day ago||

I do not like terminal tui much as I think it's a poor fit for a coding agent.

But I do use claude code tui because I have a sub: it is a good model and I like its aesthetics. If I could use the sub in my own harness I would. It's also a foil to GPT's models that overengineer everything.

I have a Codex subscription that I use in my own harness, dreamcoder.ai, which has a tiling window manager and all the other mod cons you'd expect a frontier harness to have.

In addition to that, I run Qwen 3.8 27B NVFP4 with ninfer on my 5090. It's a great model for local development. I also use that in dreamcoder.

kuboble 1 day ago||

> I do not like terminal tui much as I think it's a poor fit for a coding agent

I recently moved away from using tui to directly interact with claude code.

I still start a session in the terminal but then ask to start a simple jira- like ticketing system.

When I have a request I start a new ticket and claude decides to either do it or launch a sub agent to do it.

When claude is done or has questions- he replies in the ticket. When claude has a side-findings he creates a new ticket for me.

mickeyp 23 hours ago|||

That's a really interesting workflow.

I also do orchestrator like work that way. The key difference is I'll have a master chat and let it delegate work as needed to sub agents.

I have skills, MCP etc for things that need it, and custom-designed sub agents for a couple of very specific, niche tasks. The rest use generic delegator, explorer, worker sub agents that just take normal instructions.

aspect0545 21 hours ago|||

So does it develop a new ticket system every time? I'm not sure I can follow, could you explain?

kuboble 10 hours ago||

Yes, I have one instance of it per project. And there run only one claude code session that is only supposed to manage "jiraude" and run the actual work in subagents. I published it at https://github.com/kuba97531/jiraude

californical 1 day ago||

Can you not? I built a custom harness that uses my Claude subscription. You can pass -p I think is the flag, to feed it a prompt. And it’s been a little while so I don’t fully remember how but you can also have it print the output to stdout. I even pass it custom tools as args and it works with the cache, and you can even append messages to conversations

mickeyp 23 hours ago||

You can work around it like that for sure; you can call it from the CLI, and you get free credits also to spend.

But I meant more like, you know: hey just use the whole sub in another harness. That you can't do.

drgoodvibe 1 day ago||

I built railvio.com for myself initially, it’s taken me a year to build and it’s a full harness for building applications + fully integrated Jira and Confluence clone. That altogether has become a lovable clone which I’ve used now to deploy a tradingview clone, a risk rating rules engine clone, and an agent terminal that is a stripped down clone of Iterm2 but built with a middle layer so I can connect to long lived tmux sessions. 3x Claude ultra, codex pro, + local Qwen 27b fp8 on Radiance engine on 2xRS700 and ComfyUi on a separate machine with a rtx 4090. It’s been super fun building everything. I’ve averaged around ~40B tokens per month..

darkamaul 23 hours ago||

1/ Claude and Codex, but mostly Codex with the Business Plan 2/ No other models 3/ Default CLI most of the time, plus some agent-made tooling for some orchestration 4/ No - frontier models are already super good at this 5/ I'm using Dot, and I find it helpful as a workload dispatcher

I also don't see many differences anymore in the various frontier model - between GPT 6-Sol or Astra or Fable or Opus 5.5... Maybe my tasks are easy enough, or maybe I'm missing a lot here.

maxkxd1 1 day ago||

1) I pay for claude ultra coz the plan rates are significantly better than the api rates, and i feel like i can tokenmax harder than if i am constantly watching my credit balances.

2) yea openrouter free models, usually nemotron coz they have decent availability and I don't get constantly rate limited like with the gemma models on there.

3) honestly still using the default IDE, used to use claude code cli but nowadays i just launch claude remote control and just talk to it through my phone.

4) something custom, i wired it all up in slack so i could easily talk to agents through the same place i do my work

5) Used to use openclaw on a raspberry pi to experiment with like autonomous development but i needed something with a bit more transparency so i moved everything into slack.

rhodey 17 hours ago||

1) $200 codex and $100 claude plans

2) Using both OpenAI and OpenRouter pay-as-you-go APIs to support some apps, not as part of dev flow, as part of prod features

3) VS Code with Codex and Claude extensions (defaults) but will also say 100% of my VS Code use stays on a Macbook Neo that is decidedly not my main machine

4) No

5) No. Thinking I probably will use Dots/Muse at tax time

keithnz 1 day ago||

1, work - claude team pro (not paying for), home, codex pro (for side hustle https://rolloutrhino.com/)

2, no, except at work where I have a whole agentic helpdesk system that self improves, creates documentation, and is quite awesome really. Pretty cheap to run also.

3, my own that I keep iterating on, but I do use the clis, though with codex, the app is just awesome, don't use the tui (its good, but the app is better). Claudes app sucks in comparison, though is often better than the TUI.

4, my own tools, mostly because I started on my own ones ages ago.

5, dots, It's kind of like a project manager for the side hustle, its really coordinating a lot of stuff between all the things I have in flight

PierceJoy 1 day ago|

Curious what you find better about the codex app vs the claude app? I use both as well, but I find them fairly interchangeable. I like project and session creation a bit more on codex.

starkgoose 22 hours ago||

Current setup is pi with github-copilot sub at work - limiting self to luna-6 model. I have custom tmux + nvim + lazygit setup that allows me to quickly toggle modals and jump in and out of code / markdown files for quick review. Im limiting myself like this to get a feel for agent limitations and develop a better sense for it. I could use better models but I've found that they just hide the limitations better and it's harder to learn.

GoodFriday 16 hours ago||

I have a $20 Claude Code and a $10 Opencode Go for personal use. Work pays like $150/month for Claude Code use there. Like in another comment I put A LOT of context in Obsidian and agents log their work there.

Workflow-wise I just have a small GTD-ish setup with lists for inbox, todos etc and a couple of paragraphs describing how I want the coding process and troubleshooting processes to be handled.

The bulk of my instruction set is about communication style, since the defaults give me hives from the sticky tone and burnout from the sheer amount of words in the output. All of it works to keep answers short, to the point, sticking to technical details and absolutely no linguistic decoration or polite stuff. The most effective line I have in my Agents.md is to answer me like a Vulcan rather than a human.

steveridout 21 hours ago|

1) Claude: 180 euro / month, Codex: 100 USD / month

2) no

3) Defaults: claude and codex

4) I've built my own custom system including web UI which helps me manage agents powered by claude and codex in both headless mode and running through an automated pipeline including bug reproduction, dev, code review, qa, etc... It's proving very useful, and keeps getting better as models improve. Opus 5.5 is phenomenal.

5) I tried OpenClaw but it didn't stick for me

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