Posted by eggbrain 3 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) I tried a local Qwen model but my poor old 1660 Ti did not enjoy it, and it wasn't all that useful.
3) I primarily use OpenCode running in a podman container for actually working on stuff. Also use the default free chats with Gemini 3.5 Flash for general searching, ChatGPT for brainstorming, and Claude to answer more code related things if they come up.
4) Nope.
5) Not at the moment. I've been eyeing using Hermes, but since I don't feel comfortable paying much at the moment I haven't really tried.
I don't even understand how people can spend thousands of dollars a month on LLM tokens since I've accomplished multiple major projects with this setup. In general, Claude's better at frontend and debug and Codex is better at feature implementation and research from what I've found, which is why I have both.
2. No. GPT 6.1 Sol is very token efficient that I pretty much never run out before the end of the week anyways.
3. Default Codex/Claude app. I only use VS/VSCode to hand-edit/git sync things when needed.
4. No. Swarm is a waste of token imo, and a single good human in the loop beats any automated orchestration tool.
5. I find it unnecessary.
hard to contain myself not to change my setup too often (instead of doing actual work)
also killed my hermes web setup (also via talescale) for security reasons. not interested in having something online like that with all the vulns popping up (ssh, ubuntu, tailscale etc.)
2. Also have some API keys for some open weight models in Europe, but currently not using those.
3. I've personally used OpenCode, Claude Code and Codex and of those, I liked Codex the most, till bugs kept on accumulating and they started doing all kinds of shit like that daemon recently. I now switched to https://github.com/capocasa/3code which is a small, simple agent harness but with built-in sandbox, unlike so many other simple harnesses. I really like this one, plus the author is very responsive to feedback
4. No. And I don't think that stuff works in the long run with current quality of code output
5. No.
2. Local VPS: serve small models like Desert Ant, Laya, etc only (the VPS has GPU).
3. Hermes only: Stick with one, arch is converging.
4. No. Used to use Hedr but that's about it. I ask Hermes to do that for me. (or create custom Hermes agents by specifying graph in text)
5. Just Hermes: refer to #3. - Fun at home, build, automate, disabled gateways for online chatting becauese of bugs (not sharing)
Hermes, OpenRouter, . No Claude/Codex sub too expensive. Use them at work instead.