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

Posted by eggbrain 1 day 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.

473 points | 571 commentspage 6

linsomniac 3 hours ago|

There are SO MANY custom orchestration schemes here (which is great; I am working on my own).

Do you see people consolidating onto a few commercial/open source factories, factory features getting built into Claude Code et al., or are custom orchestrators easy enough now that they're likely to be the future?

SOLAR_FIELDS 2 hours ago|

All of these gas towns and no one running evals to compare to the vanilla harness. AI is very good at making one feel like they are being productive

linsomniac 2 hours ago||

The warp.dev one, according to the demo video, makes it easy to set up tests of different workflows and generate the typical quadrant plot of different configs. About a third of the way down the page at https://www.warp.dev/

lintbrush 3 hours ago||

Claude Code (Opus or Sonnet) via Herdr with probably 4 or 5 things going at once but at different levels of urgency. Mostly I'll be working on one thing (and maybe two git work trees of a project?) and then then have some other research or analytics task going.

We're a non-profit and Anthropic actually has quite nice pricing for teams licenses so I can do most of what I need in a day within the team "Nonprofit Premium" allowances without paying for extra usage.

I have MCPs connecting to Asana (for bug/task tracking) and Looker (for reporting and analytics) but otherwise the setup for each project is just its own GitHub repo and the occasional local skill (eg one that understands common Looker data patterns for our setup or the wacky history of our Archive).

For longer batch tasks or our automated systems we're using various models through Bedrock so I can track it with the rest of our AWS spend and that's been working quite well.

I'm experimenting with Opencode and Openrouter/Bedrock. If Claude Code didn't exist I would think Opencode was a miracle from heaven so it's a nice backup Anthropic pricing gets unweidy.

tomsellin23 2 hours ago||

Ok Grok Bot, what a damn help. It does so much for me, including my scheduling, runs all sorts of reports I wasn't getting before, checks my emails for me, responds for me with my approval, and so so much more. And I think I'm only scratching the surface of it all. It's worth every penny I'm paying.

willio58 17 hours ago||

Claude 100$/mo for personal projects.

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.

reddalo 17 hours ago|

I'm a complete newbie on this: how do you make Claude spin up other agents? And what do all those agents do separately?

sillysaurusx 16 hours ago|||

For example, say you want to search for bugs in 100 code files. Ask Claude to “use subagents to look for bugs across these files” and it will likely spin up 5 agents, each taking a different section of the codebase. Theoretically in the limit case this is 5x faster than Claude doing it without subagents.

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.

reddalo 8 hours ago||

Thanks for the explanation. I'll give it a try whenever I need to do something similar.

willio58 16 hours ago||||

You can tell it to do so, but what you'll find is it knows to do it when it needs to. This is another case of "don't overthink it". Just let your agent decide when spinning up sub-agents makes sense.

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

mholm 17 hours ago||||

You tell it to spin up subagents, they do whatever the parent told them to do, usually a segment of a task you gave it.

mceachen 11 hours ago|||

"use subagents as applicable" (and maybe "use sonnet for simpler tasks")

reddalo 8 hours ago||

Thanks. The Sonnet part is smart to save tokens.

fritzo 1 hour ago||

Cursor + Codex + Claude each at $20/month + API usage, <$100 total.

I still like to read code in an IDE.

Every few months my favorite model becomes an idiot savant so I need to switch.

grishka 3 hours ago||

I don't use AI. At all. And honestly, I would like it gone for everyone. The world would be better off without it.

joddystreet 2 hours ago||

1. AI subscriptions- Codex (Pro), Ollama (Max), Copilot (for Zed autocompletes)

2. N/A

3. Coding harnesses - Codex, Pi. (Switched from claude code)

4. Just codex, no agent swarms. When starting a new module - focused work, one issue, one agent, one project. For smaller tasks/minor issues - multiple parallel sessions, within codex or pi.

5. N/A

lamuswawir 1 hour ago||

I use meta ai pro subscription. Plus deepseek API. I hop around alot, have held Google AI Pro subs for most of the time.

I use pi as the general agent for most of the work.

auslegung 1 day ago||

How about, what sandboxing are you using to prevent the LLM from doing something you don’t want? I’m using nono.sh and have restricted network and file access. I use nono’s proxy so the LLM never gets access to api keys. I create a separate api key for each service specifically for LLM usage, and I restrict those keys as much as possible

h45x1 10 hours ago||

I wrote my own bash wrapper around bubblewrap and pasta: https://github.com/andrei-dubovik/jail

The wrapper also keeps history, memory, etc. split by project folder, so agents working in different projects don't know each others' history. If anything, `--resume` is a split second easier.

warpspin 21 hours ago|||

Tried nono.sh but it seemed cumbersome. I think it lets the whole agent run in the sandbox, so whenever you need to change something, you have to restart the whole thing, if I remember right.

Also tried Docker Sandboxes which worked fine during the try out but my trust in Docker products with regards to security is low in general, so I'd wanted to wait a bit whether problems show up.

Then used Codex for the built-in sandbox but it's buggy like hell, documented features just do not work properly. Nobody there every seemed to actually try using the stuff they are documenting as working.

Ended up with 3code right now, which also has built-in configurable sandboxing.

binsquare 13 hours ago|||

[flagged]

sharathr 20 hours ago|||

try https://www.droneship.run

salt-licker 8 hours ago|||

I built something which auto-containerizes the agents for you (gvisor isolation, with credentials injected via proxy and url allowlist), but still allows orchestration between the agents, and a desktop app as well: https://github.com/bsklaroff/yaac

mickael-kerjean 17 hours ago|||

I have been working on a shared folder that sync between agents (https://www.filestash.app/agents/). The control plane [1] handles pretty much all storages protocols / platform (S3, SFTP, NFS< SMB, ....), you add the controls / permission boundaries and everything is auditable + traces, and the sync client is at the edge [2] to sync the data it actually has access.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

[2] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive

orendor 10 minutes ago||

[flagged]

rufugee 2 hours ago|

I've built a web-based control room for a single developer to run multiple agents from multiple vendors behind a single pane of glass. It keeps the record of every session, puts whatever needs you in one queue, gives each new session the context it needs, and shows you what got done while you were away. Completely vibe-coded (Ruby on Rails), but very productive.

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