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

Posted by eggbrain 2 days 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.

532 points | 656 commentspage 25

ghempton 1 day ago|

1) claude, claude again, codex, antigravity, cursor 2) no 3) using a variety of different harnesses managed by codealong 4) built https://github.com/codealong/codealong 5) openclaw not used very much anymore in favor of native harnesses

joshstrange 1 day ago||

1. Claude Ultra for personal, Claude Max for work, Codex $100/mo

2. OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Luna, and testing out models here and there

3. Claude Code and Codex for the respective subscriptions. Played with OpenCode and Pi some as well

4. I've tried a number of these tools and settled on my own tool (not released) to oversee my agents

5. Played with OpenClaw and Hermes in the past, cool ideas but execution fell flat. I currently use Dots and Duet for little things (mostly monitoring communications). Dots is much better than Duet today but I hope Duet gets better.

jasondigitized 22 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.

fhcbix 1 day ago||

Codex and Pi, both with custom model provider pointing at the (currently free) Hetzner Inference API. Mostly for understanding code and prototypes + refactors, fully vibe-coding stuff in languages I know well just isn't fun so I have no use for that.

internet_points 1 day ago||

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

None.

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

I have a few ChatGPT API credits. I think I've payed at most $40 in one year, using 5.4.

Just gptel in a firejailed Emacs. I don't do tool calling. Mostly just code review (have personal scripts set up to get diffs and automatically redact stuff).

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

No.

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

No.

I'd like to try agent stuff using a local model, but it seems quite expensive to set up. I don't feel comfortable giving so much access to OpenAI/Anthropic.

sigmoid10 1 day ago|

How did you end up with only $40 in API cost despite using AI daily?

internet_points 1 day ago||

Were you looking at another comment? I had to reread what I wrote, and I can't understand where you'd get the impression that I use it that much. I don't even use it daily (looking at my stats, it seems I used it less than every other day).

gpt5.4 pricing per million tokens is Input: $2.50 Cached input: $0.25 Output: $15.00

I tried re-running a rather long code review request I had lying around, and gptel says it spent 2.2k tokens; I don't know if that's input or output or what, but if we say it's output since that's the most expensive, then that single review cost me just $0.033.

sigmoid10 21 hours ago||

I know about the prices and that's why I wondered how you could possibly give an answer to these questions. But now I'm just wondering why you felt compelled to answer here when OP specifically asked about day-to-day AI use and agentic workflows and you seem to have experience with neither.

internet_points 3 hours ago||

OP said "I'm curious how people on HN are using AI day to day" and I gave an honest answer. If the answers were only from those using agentic setups daily, that would give a skewed picture. (And I do have some experience with agentic coding, but for now I'm staying away from it; mainly because I don't trust it with my data and I can't quite justify the cost of a local setup.)

But before this thread gets too deep, maybe you want to ask https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50376720 why they feel compelled to answer here. Or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50375782 . Or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50367460 . Since you were wondering.

joegibbs 1 day ago||

1. Claude Max with Opus 5.5 and the ChatGPT $20 plan, I have a few thousand bucks of credits since they reduced the Codex plan so I’m using it for all the bulk data tasks that it would be a waste to use Claude for.

2. ChatGPT Image still looks really bad to me so I use Gemini Image. I tried Argon but it really didn’t work for me so I just use the image model at API rates.

3. Just the default Claude/ChatGPT desktop apps. I used the command line tools for a while but the desktop ones are much easier to use when working with images, and you get the usage down the bottom.

4. No, I think this is all a big gimmick. I barely use subagents. It makes sense to have multiple people at a company with different roles due to their different capabilities and experiences - but when the models are identical clones then why not just have one do the whole job? I only use subagents for bulk data tasks because otherwise they get distracted chitchatting with each other.

5. No, I haven’t tried them yet. What’s the benefit over ChatGPT or Claude?

mangasmango 1 day ago|

If you use claude code on ultracode it already spawns subagents by default now, i think agent orchestrator has the only benefit of ofloading some tokens and making the subagents to not get distracted by the bigger picture but i cant see any use case of the broader orchestration on a project that is already solid and you just push features and debug, a single session give you more ownership of what is build

joegibbs 1 day ago||

Yeah, the ability of the sessions to message each other turns it into a mess. They all start messaging each other with unrelated tasks and you end up not knowing what each thread is meant to be working on.

I notice that single-threaded agents get stuck with things sometimes like writing some tool they need inefficiently so that it takes 3 hours when it could be 3 minutes (meaning that a task ends up taking days instead of hours, unless I intervene and tell it to make a fast tool instead) but subagents just compound this as they burn through tokens without realising the problem.

paustint 1 day ago||

I was using VSCode with Claude Code extension, multiple tabs at once, multiple instances per worktree.... then I listened to the Lex Fridman episode with DHH [1] and they mentioned Herdr [2] and I tried it out - NEVER LOOKED BACK! It has been an extremely long time since I completely abandoned and changed my setup - surprised myself.

Herdr is awesome - it pings me when an agent is done or needs my attention and shows me all my terminal panes that are running an agent that I can access with one click.

I am now 90% Herdr terminal, open IDE maybe 1-2 times a day just for more convenient way to look at something. I searched ways to stay in the terminal - found lazygit and love it!

I use long-running worktrees (e.g. named worktree-1, worktree-2, worktree-3, ...) and have parallel work going on in them so I can work on whatever I want.

In each Herdr workspace, I have three tabs: 1st is for ~3 panes, one for Claude and two or more to run the app and basic terminal. Tab 2 for lazy git, and Tab 3 for an extra terminal when I need one. For example, right now I have ~20 Herdr workspaces open now between a few projects, multiple worktrees per project and a few across remote machines ready in case I need them. When in the zone, I might have 1-8+ agents working on completely different tasks.

I have a couple remote machines over SSH that I use when I need a task to run and I need to close my laptop.

I have a keyboard shortcut to init my workspace to that setup. lazygit is amazing.

I ask claude to do everything for me, for example: "Let's do it, open a jira ticket, assign to me and put into sprint. Fix it and open a pr"

I create artifacts all the time to share findings with team or as a checklist of manual testing I need to do.

I find that gh copilit does pretty good review on PRs, and I have a claude skill to go address all the copilot feedback (review, validate, reply, resolve, push changes if any were made).

I was on the 200/mo Claude plan but had to switch to the Team plan, so I pay 120/mo for two users and I swap to the 20 plan when I hit my 5hr limit on my 100/mo plan.

[1]: https://lexfridman.com/podcast -> DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux [2]: https://herdr.dev/

flavius37 1 day ago||

Here is a summary of the comments from this thread. Updates will follow to include latest comments too.

https://techaddo.com/posts/ai-agentic-setups

elestor 1 day ago|

1) None, I use freellmapi https://github.com/tashfeenahmed/freellmapi

2) No

3) Oh my pi in bwrap sandbox, used to use Opencode

4) No

5) No

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