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.
pay-as-you go on openrouter. use latest DeepSeek or Gemini.
I created my own minimalist/task based harness that checks out a jira issue, downloads attachments, runs sandbox docker containers with configurable gh/local repo as volume mounts depending on jira labels, can load agent instructions from local/remote depending on jira type (triage-bug, dev task, reproduce-bug, security) has scoped/temporary access to targets (e.g. dev k8s cluster, aws/gcp/azure account, ssh, splunk). dynamic secrets loaded from external secret management system/env vars. since a lot of the corp repos are littered with skills, rules and other crap that bloated the context, I also set enabled a way to ignore repo/org agent instructions.
I have 2 repos for storing my personal/corp agent instructions and I 2 separate harness configurations.
On there i run claude code and codex via ssh and zed‘s ssh connection feature to take a look at the code where necessary.
I map a range of ports so I can take a look at previews.
Agents just continue running when I close the lid.
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.
Claude code CLI, rotated with codex CLI (monkey patched to be able to message with Claude sessions over the Unix socket thingies).
Local ollama server running qwen and a bunch of other models.
I'm having an absolute blast!
My projects accumulate here: joemattie.com
2) No.
3) Claude Desktop (home/work). Cut and paste when using Gemini or ChatGPT
4) No
5) No.
Claude Code Desktop on Windows: I like it. Simple UI that I started using about 2-3 months ago and have grown with it. Multiple sessions, virtual groups for sessions, etc. I can see my manual workload of managing things is getting larger so I want better project tooling. Some of the default selections tend to stick with what you selected first and I dont like those aspects (new sessions seems to default to your original/first session folder - so we need to clean that up or create some built-in /new-session skills, etc)
However, what I really want now is voice integration without having to click on the speaker icon and talk to it (or a way to keep the speaker icon depressed) . I want the ability to get off my chair and away from my screen and talk to it. This part is easy, I think, and would be a good start. To close the loop I would like to hear the feedback. However... getting the responses to have a 'conversation modality' instead of a 'verbose text modality/Claude speak output' may be a bigger challenge. The workflow will never be 100% display free. But if we can get the audio aspects worked out, projection could be to a pair of smart glasses (XReal, Apple, Meta, Google) - activated only when needed (read something or see a UI design, etc) and then pushed aside.
Anyone one have a minimal keyboard/display approach working for them?
2) I primarily use Qwen 3.8 flash q2 on an R9700 with 4x256k context. I also have some Openrouter credits as an escape hatch if I need it (usually to work on my local AI configuration, sometimes to speed up certain tasks).
3) Pi[1] with a suite of extensions and context files that I have built out myself for the most part, with a few external extensions. One of the main external tools that I really like for coding is openspec[2]. I switched to Pi from Codex because I liked the minimalist philosophy behind it, and because at the time I was using a 7900 XTX (which is now my primary desktop gpu, and I also use for auxiliary services like whisper and decision models), and I was having a hard time getting 100k context with any reasonably useful model. The default prompts of Codex ate into that a lot, and Pi was a much better match for the resources I had.
4) I use Herdr (tui)[3] to manage Pi agents. All agent to agent interactions that I do are ad hoc. I'll do things like tell an agent to spin up work in several other Herdr panes that I have opened with Pi in them, or I will do things like tell an agent to inspect the work of another agent and make sure that it continues to stay on task.
5) No.
[1] https://pi.dev/
My approach is to build the builder rather than the feature. So if something is off in the output I try to adress it through the orchestrator. Might lead to a bit overfitting but I feel like the results are quite good too far. Also really nice to be able to remove useless stuff with a single prompt.
Building a custom orchestrator for my workflow was quite easy. Like 1-2 weeks of prompting and now my work mainly consists of refining linear tickets in a claude / codex cli and then reviewing the completed MR on the other side of my orchestrator (through the custom GUI).
I previously had an open source grant for Claude and that was quite good as well. There is a sort of "just good enough" point that we're reaching where all the providers are on similar levels. Like cloud. Everyone reached feature parity with AWS. Now it doesn't matter.
I don't use Gemini. Google is great. I use AI mode in search for general knowledge stuff but honestly the thousand moving parts and unique ways in which their products break is annoying. I used to work at Google. They have amazing tech. But I came in through acquisition. I'm not a die hard engineer. I think they built from the ground up and everything is limited by the scope of the infrastructure. So they design APIs like that. Google itself was a single input box. Simple. But I think Gemini and the API needs work. They are going to do well as cloud infrastructure for enterprise. And their models will probably get widely deployed in all their own products.