I have a $100 claude subscription and a deepseek account though I haven't used it much. Just today I published a blog post about my setup [0], but the TLDR is vanilla claude code (and sometimes oh-my-pi) with an Obsidian vault.

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!

[0] https://dcferreira.com/post/2026-10-how-i-use-agents/

two max Claude suscriptions, active dev in vscode to share screenshots, GitHub tickets for memory, basic skills, superpowers,subagentic coding with opus and the main in fable, daily Cron tasks for answering email/linkedin/etc. Desktop Claude for video/music editing . No API usage, expensive for my needs.

Wow I am pretty sure I read thru all comments and mignt be the first to say I use qwen 3.8 advanced because it's free

i use hermes-agent as my personal assistant and it talks to my claude code and codex if it needs to do projects and other stuff. openrouter is my default for the hermes-agent and sometimes i connect to lm-studio if openrouter gets errors or maybe try out some local models

Take a look at gnosh.ai; it is a frontier harness worth understanding. You will hear about it in the coming weeks.

work: claude subs Opus 5.5 mostly

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.

1. 20$ Anthropic

2. deepseek api, local qwen/gemma on fw desktop

3. Claude & Pi

4. No 5. No

I'm basic "type what you want in prompt, read what comes out"

Claude Code Ultra as the primary agent, Codex Pro as a second-opinion reviewer, with Rex as my terminal and multiplexer.

Opencode with $10 Opencode Go plan until his heinous Clammy Sammy lets me have enough Ram for a local inference setup.

1) Not paying for anything personally, except for whatever the ChatGPT casual plan is for the family to use. All my work usage is on the $100/month OpenAI plan.

I had the free Claude Max for Open Source plan, but haven't paid for it again now that it lapsed. I haven't used Claude for ages anyway, the way it talks really annoys the hell out of me, Codex App & models are far nicer IME.

2) No

3) I'm happy with the Codex/ChatGPT desktop app, works super well. Also use the Codex VSCode plugin a bit, and started recently experimenting with herdr. Used to use Cursor but I switched when Musk bought it. Very very occasionally I use some other thing like opencode or pi for targeted situations, or Codex in the CLI

4) No

5) No

I don't have the bizarre need to have dozens of agents going at once in my work or personal time, already feel flat out at work just using Codex w/ worktrees for a few concurrent projects at a time. I feel more productive than ever, I don't see how I could add more without being overwhelmed