Posted by eggbrain 1 day 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.
I work on cross-platform apps, so need to run things on a PC as well as my Mac. To make it less faff to switch between them, I run Juggler (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler) on both. Juggler treats local and remote sessions the same way, so I have both machines set up with the same two windows, one for the PC and one for the Mac. That means I can move seats between them and have the exact same two windows controlling each machine wherever I am..
2) I self host a Q4 quant of GLM 5.3 flash, at work using Antigravity and Gemini Argon
3) Vanilla Pi cli and running in a VM. I customized it to work around common LLMism, like intercepting and modifying requests or tool calls.
4) Pi is my agent orchestration, it can run in headless mode recursively. Also most of the things the agent UIs provide can be done via writing to shared files to disk
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!
At work I'm afforded a Claude subscription that is 5x that much usage and I simply cannot use even half. I'm not coding at all anymore at work, just driving Claude. It only needs a bit of direction.
I also use OpenRouter with OpenCode, and a homegrown harness I wrote initially without AI help but later on with AI help. But I haven't used this setup for a while. I swapped models based on the churn as reported by artificialanalysis.ai but they don't release as much data via their free API anymore.
I also can run Qwen 27B A3B on my NVIDIA 5060 Ti 16GB but I don't bother with that anymore either.
I don't use orchestration or swarm. Occasionally Claude spawns a few sub-agents as it needs more data and is preserving it's context window.
2. Use OpenRouter for some agentic work and for using GLM 5.3 for some security reviews.
3. Mostly the model harnesses (desktop apps for business and personal tasks and cli harnesses for coding). Use pi with openrouter.
4. My thesis is that one-time work (creative, coding, etc.) is different than on-going repetitive work--the work of the back office. I've built a platform for the latter specifically around centralizing agents while decentralizing orchestration. (https://sleeperservice.io/)
5. Waiting on a Duet invitation. But Dots is interesting to me. Use Gemini with Gmail to some extent.
I already had a bunch of my projects on the server with with code-server (VS code in a browser) set up to access it, so switching between code-server and OpenChamber is just switching tabs.
However, I've mostly been managing it from my phone - the OpenChamber app is awesome. I still switch back to my laptop occasionally - it's a better interface for reading and writing code, and also the desktop OpenChamber app has a built-in browser that it can manage, which comes in handy.
Oh, and separate from all that, I have Facebook muse set to automatically lower prices on a couple things I have on FB marketplace.
Opus 5.5 for 99.9% of tasks. Fable for the rest.
Harness: Claude Code plugin for VS Code. At some point I guess I'll switch to just the claude code app but tbh this is super ergonomic for me.
No agent orchestration besides literally just letting claude spin up agents for me.
No broader systems.
And I'm _massively_ productive with the setup I describe above. I say this not to gloat, I'm sure others have great methods but I do say this in case anyone is feeling overwhelmed by the options out there. My 2 cents is don't overthink it.
Any kind of problem shaped like map reduce can be accelerated this way: Looking through your banking records, searching through a database, asking Claude to find that one weird file you remember from three years ago but forgot where you saved it, etc.
Just know that there’s no quicker way to hit your limits than to use subagents. So use them if it’s paid for by your work or whenever you need the 5x speed boost.
If you focus too much on optimization, and you do so in the wrong ways, you'll actually find you saved no time/money/tokens vs just letting it decide when to do it. This applies as much to Agentic engineering as it did with programming pre-AI.
tl;dr it will literally do it for you, and it'll tell you when it does so