Posted by eggbrain 2 days 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.
2) No
3) N/A
4) No
5) No
This week I started using Herdr also, and while I don't yet have it setup as I'd want, it's slightly better than me previous pure tmux setup to manage multiple agents. I also always turn on remote control on claude so I can control it via the app.
I suspect the gas towns and similar are no longer a necessity: I think as the models get better, the organization structures need less attention. I've been doing fine with, for each project, spinning up just one manager to manage all the relevant sessions and ping me when I'm needed. Or if I want to be hands off I get a pm and a tech lead claude sessions up, and the pm moves the work forward while the tech lead makes decisions on what to work on next and how to tackle it. This is in spirit a similar thing to gas town, but incredibly simplified. I don't think this would work with claude 3.5, but with 5.5 I'm quite happy!
2. Kimi on OpenRouter, Abliterated.ai as needed
3. Claude Code (with all models), Claude Desktop, tried pi.dev, opencode
4. No
5. No
Main use case(s):
- Software applications
- One-off automations (calendar sync from scraped data, email alerts)
- Deep research and planning for personal stuff
In practice that means Duck.AI and Perplexity.
And the system clipboard.
I now use Muse as my primary agent and then spin up and manage Codex and Claude agents as needed on an Oracle server.
personal: $200 for ultra claude subs + I haveT5810 with older xeosn e52499v4 128gb ram + 3060 12gb ram with Strata
I actually use my personal claude 100% every week I could easily do with 2-3 subs more. I would easily find a work for them.
2) No.
3) Opus 5.5 on high for all the work. Reviewed by Codex by default. Additionally by Grok and Gemini (agy) for critical work.
I switched from Claude CLI to a custom-built harness because I got overwhelmed by walls of text in parallel sessions. Now I have a canvas per project where I spatially lay out cards. Each card spawns an agent in a worktree. The chat with it is condensed to WhatsApp style chat bubbles with all the thinking and tool calls folded away. The result of a card is a demo, usually a narrated video that I can comment on to trigger another iteration. Everything voice first, I mostly speak. Phone companion so I can keep working on the go.
I used to work with up to 6 Claude CLIs in parallel and couldn't go further. With my custom UX, I can do 20+ with fun. Now the bottleneck is actually my machine, so I added remote worker support to my harness to distribute the load to more machines.
(I open sourced the harness in the hope of sharing the fun. If you want to try it: https://github.com/sadilek/obeya)
4) No Paperclip or Munder Difflin or anything. I actually think it doesn't make sense to create persistent agent personas. Just spawn an agent when needed, give each full access to all skills and docs, and they'll figure it out.
5) Hermes Agent running, sending me regular news research reports, but frankly, it's just a cronjob and the whole Hermes setup isn't really adding value for me.