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

1. Z.ai coding pro plan that i got last christmas for $14 a month. Will not renew in jan.

2. Locally hosted qwen 3.8 flash next on a wake on lan machine rtx5090

3. Currently orca as front end orchestrator to a mini pc with pi for coding and hermes for general purpose

Claude Pro for personal. (Kiro at work.)

Moving towards long-running, asynchronous delegation where I use a locally running instance of Fizzy kanban board to manage and track all work.

When I think of something I might want an agent to do, I create a card. When I want to delegate I assign to agent and move to To Do. I usually try batch things, then use a slash command to invoke a fizzy skill. I do this in a terminal and then close it and do other things.

Couple hours later I'll check the board and see what's in review column for me. Read comments, look over PRs, etc. Agent has broad access to specific project folders and repos.

In general feeling more like working with a colleague than chatting with a bot.

I was using VSCode with Claude Code extension, multiple tabs at once, multiple instances per worktree.... then I listened to the Lex Fridman episode with DHH [1] and they mentioned Herdr [2] and I tried it out - NEVER LOOKED BACK! It has been an extremely long time since I completely abandoned and changed my setup - surprised myself.

Herdr is awesome - it pings me when an agent is done or needs my attention and shows me all my terminal panes that are running an agent that I can access with one click.

I am now 90% Herdr terminal, open IDE maybe 1-2 times a day just for more convenient way to look at something. I searched ways to stay in the terminal - found lazygit and love it!

I use long-running worktrees (e.g. named worktree-1, worktree-2, worktree-3, ...) and have parallel work going on in them so I can work on whatever I want.

In each Herdr workspace, I have three tabs: 1st is for ~3 panes, one for Claude and two or more to run the app and basic terminal. Tab 2 for lazy git, and Tab 3 for an extra terminal when I need one. For example, right now I have ~20 Herdr workspaces open now between a few projects, multiple worktrees per project and a few across remote machines ready in case I need them. When in the zone, I might have 1-8+ agents working on completely different tasks.

I have a couple remote machines over SSH that I use when I need a task to run and I need to close my laptop.

I have a keyboard shortcut to init my workspace to that setup. lazygit is amazing.

I ask claude to do everything for me, for example: "Let's do it, open a jira ticket, assign to me and put into sprint. Fix it and open a pr"

I create artifacts all the time to share findings with team or as a checklist of manual testing I need to do.

I find that gh copilit does pretty good review on PRs, and I have a claude skill to go address all the copilot feedback (review, validate, reply, resolve, push changes if any were made).

I was on the 200/mo Claude plan but had to switch to the Team plan, so I pay 120/mo for two users and I swap to the 20 plan when I hit my 5hr limit on my 100/mo plan.

[1]: https://lexfridman.com/podcast -> DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux [2]: https://herdr.dev/

1) Work covers my Claude and Codex subscriptions. Each is the ~$200/month tier.

2) I have a "live Zoom call audio transcription" setup that uses Silero VAD, Qwen3-ASR-1.7B, Qwen3-4B-Instruct, and pyannote speaker-diarization-community-1.

3) Claude Code in the Desktop UI using remote control environments.

4) Custom orchestrator for having Codex review Claude or vice-versa: https://github.com/navels/neal

5) I have built over time a personal assistant using Claude remote control running on a mac mini, this is likely similar to Dots?

1) Neither. 2) Yes, I use pay as you go from OpenAI and Anthropic. 3) OpenCode 4) No 5) No

I use OpenCode to update my Home Assistant automations. Home Assistant also does two lightweight checks a day using gpt-5-luna (Look at this photo is the pool cover on or off?). I also use OpenCode for a few other small basic tasks.

This is me personally. At work I have a ChatGPT sub an a, seemingly limitless (I don't use it much tho) OpenAI API key.

I’ve moved from paid subscriptions on Codex to Claude to Muse.

I now use Muse as my primary agent and then spin up and manage Codex and Claude agents as needed on an Oracle server.

1. I use both Melious[1] and Entrim[2]. I have a Melious Pro subscription, €150/month and use Entrim pay-as-you-go API, because it's cheap.

I used to have two Mistral subscriptions, because I needed the extra capacity, but quickly realised I'd need three or more, so switched to the two providers above.

2. Providers covered in the first point. Regarding models I use a combination of GLM5.3, GLM5.3 Flash and Deepseek 4.1 Flash 1017. Which model I use depends on the task. GLM5.3 Flash for general chat and co-ordination tasks. Deepseek 1017 for most coding related work and GML5.3 for adversarial batteries and documentation.

3. Maki[3], although quite customised with various plugins. No python permitted, only Janet for scripting. Extremely limited bash calls, instead preferring to use the built in harness tooling, or plugin tooling I've written. AGENTS and skills used extensively. Mechanical gates also used to prevent certain actions, like remote git pushes without explicit prior approval.

I switched to Maki for the token saving strategies and stayed for the ergonomics, which I think I like, but maybe just feel comfortable with now.

4. None listed. The closest I come is a multipane Zellij setup with different agents running in different panes. Orchestration is still human in the loop though.

5. None

[1] https://melious.ai

[2] https://entrim.ai

[3] https://maki.sh/

I'm currently using https://www.conductor.build/ for working on multiple projects at the same time with git worktrees and my Claude subscription. The annoying part is that if I have a frontend repository and a backend repository I have to tell each session "talk to this workspace to adapt the backend" if I'm working on the frontend. I wish they had better support for multiple repos in one session.

Separately I'm evaluating https://ampcode.com/ which is very polished, but I feel like the diff-reading part is not very prominent there which I find a bit odd. After watching many of their videos I feel like that's because they are opinionated on this not being necessary any more as the models are good enough. I kind of agree, but still like to give it a last glance before committing.

1) None.

2) Yes, trying different models and harnesses through many providers (free/trial). mimo-v2.6-flash, minimax-m3.1-flash, glm-5.3-flash, deepseek-v4.1-flash, gpt-oss:120b, nemotron-3.5.-super-vl.120b-a12b, and others.

3) Mostly eca.dev on Emacs, and Claude Code at work. Now trying the OpenCode one too.

4) No.

5) No.

1）claude（pro）、ChatGPT（business）、Kimi（pro）；各一个订阅； 2）是的；Deepseek（API）； 3）默认的CLI； 4）否； 5）否。

我是谁：一名做基础医学数据分析的博士研究生。

Phasing out my usage of cloud based LLMs/harnesses.

Focus is pi + self hosted GLM Flash.

Pi is lightweight and easily extensible and creates minimal extra noise. the output I get is very close to what I want to see.

my workflow is focused on clear turns between planning, testing and implementation. Any useful/recurring tasks, like getting/filtering logs, checking statuses etc get regularly folded into a project cli and agent skills that are local to the project.

I spend time interactively iterating on the plan/design and acceptance tests, then let it do its thing. Usually I have multiple interactive sessions at once that I'm steering this way. 1-2 assigned projects, 1-3 side projects (additional automation, experiments/POCs, workflow/process efficiency etc.). I generally don't do sub-agents. When I need throughput I automate first, frontloading the "deterministic" parts.

I only use genuine intelligence

These comments read like people just bragging about having multiple AI subscriptions but not actually giving any info about what they're using them for

I feel like this is a great opportunity to mention https://github.com/regnull/openbot, my attempt to create an open-source tool similar to Grok Bot. You can hook it up to OpenRouter and solve 80% of problems with 1/10th of the cost. I use it all the time. Contributors are always welcome.

I've been increasingly interested in language-oriented programming and denotational design. So i get claude to create a domain specific language in Racket modelling the software i'm trying to build, we create nouns and verbs whose meaning fits the behaviour i'm going for, then when we find bugs or notice we need more exceptional (less-elegant) one-off behaviour to tackle edge-cases, we iterate on the language in such a manner that it these are tackled emergently with preferably less concepts, more cohersion and composition. It's somewhat similar to how memory safety is handled at compile time in Rust but for business logic.

i dont have one

I'm currently on Raven as a sort of "meta harness". The main chat is with the orchestrator, which delegates all work to other harnesses. I just use different seat-based plans. Mostly the latest Sol with my corp chatgpt account.

I get a lot of value from having an LLM to talk to LLMs for me. It can automatically set up adversarial reviews from other ecosystems, or just prompt the implementation LLM to adhere to certain standards. My goal is to have fewer touch points when implementing. I want to speech to text a paragraph or two giving "taste" to the process; everything else is just toil.

1. No

2. OpenRouter PAYG - glm or opus for most things

3. OMP or CC

4. Zellij/Vim — some things never change

5. No

1. Claude pro monthly

2. Kimi on OpenRouter, Abliterated.ai as needed

3. Claude Code (with all models), Claude Desktop, tried pi.dev, opencode

4. No

5. No

Main use case(s):

- Software applications

- One-off automations (calendar sync from scraped data, email alerts)

- Deep research and planning for personal stuff

1) the cheapest Claude sub, $20usd I think.

2) pretty much just opus

3) claude code - but with Orca + app (being able to dev remotely via the app has been great for personal projects)

Work has me stuck with Cursor, which I don't find as good, even when using claude models.

1) What AI subscriptions are you personally paying for?

My employer pays for copilot, business plan. It also pays for Gemini.

2) Are you using models outside (or instead) of those subscriptions?

Gemini, company-wide. I mostly use it for general research, making clip art, and occasional programming questions / technical questions. I don't use it everyday, but when I use it, I really like it.

I no longer use ChatGPT or Claude's general-purpose chat bots.

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?

IDE integration with Visual Studio, and Copilot code reviews on Github. I mostly use agent mode; sometimes I use ask mode, and sometimes I use plan mode. (One very important thing is to instruct copilot, in .github\copilot-instructions.md, to only use its edit tool and not use Powershell to edit files. Otherwise you need to babysit it and approve cryptic find and replace commands.)

For Copilot in Visual Studio, I almost always use Claude Opus 5.5. Some of the GPT models "appear" to work well, but they leave the code harder to maintain.

We now do a round of Copilot reviews with our pull requests in draft mode before asking others to do the review; and we're not spending as much time "reading" code when looking at pull requests.

We don't (yet) have agents running unattended with high-level instructions and then making pull requests.

4) Are you using any agent orchestration or swarm tools?

No

5) Are you using broader agent platforms like OpenClaw / Hermes Agent / Grok bot / Dots / Muse?

No

------

One important thing: I'm after my boss to dedicate time (1-2 weeks) for me to set up and learn more of the hands-off tools. I love working with co-pilot, but it's best for work where I need to be hands-on. I really need to be able to offload simple work, or work where lower-quality results are okay, to a bot that I don't need to supervise.

My workflow has simplified a lot over the past year and I personally haven't seen a need for complex orchestration tools or the agent platforms like OpenClaw / Hermes.

Since agents can message each other nowadays, most of the time I just talk to one Opus 5.5 session (because of its 1M context window) and let it talk to all the other sessions, acting as an orchestrator that I use from the cli and the mobile app. I also have some of my agents reachable over IRC through a small CLI I'm building.

I subscribe to both Claude and Codex. Mostly at the top tiers, but I downgrade every once in a while based on how much I'm using them.

I don't use Codex directly as much, even though their harness has gotten a lot better and snappier over this year. Most of the time Claude is the one using Codex on my behalf. I was using this delegation workflow a lot until Anthropic fixed the word salad issues on Opus 5.5. Nowadays I mostly do it to load balance my token usage.

I also use locally hosted models (both via CUDA and MLX), but much less for coding unless it's for asynchronous tasks that I can't use subscriptions for. My main use case for local inference is privacy and tinkering.

I've also been building my own harness focused on security and privacy for the past year or so, but it's still a work in progress.

gptel + gptel-agent in emacs, hooked up to a Claude API token and ChatGPT oauth provided by work, plus some custom gptel additions (tools and tool invocation inspection mainly).

I'm using claude with a pro subscription. Claude Code extension in VSCode devcontainers and Claude CLI in a restricted Windows account in powershell terminal for android development. No orchestration other than a directive in CLAUDE.md to allocate coding tasks to sub-agents.

I've moved all my ssh keys into a key-agent which prompts for key use as I got alarmed by claude attempting to login to remote systems to verify things as it worked through problems.

1) Xiaomi Mimo Pro 2) I purchase periodic credits through Tailscale Aperture 3) MiMocode for working with Mimo, Pi with the others 4/5) Nope

I use T3 Code as my front-end for all my coding agents on all my personal computers and my VPS.

For the actual agents I use Claude Code for my Claude subscription, Codex for my OpenAI subscription (I usually only keep one of those at a time), and pi for my OpenCode Go subscription.

I mostly use Sonnet 5.5 medium and Sol 6.1 medium for everything. But lately I have been using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash a lot and find it very capable.

At work I use T3 Code as well, but it isn't connected to my personal machines or subscriptions and use Github Copilot in T3 Code via ACP. Model choice is similar, but for more involved tasks for architecture analysis or design, big features that touch a lot of interconnected subsystems, etc. I'll turn up reasoning effort to high or use Opus 5.5 on medium or high. But when actually implementing, I try to break up my tasks into smaller pieces and the models usually do well even without reasoning turned up.

Most of my work goes into rewriting prose in reports, commit messages, PR summaries, etc. because all models still struggle with that. (Claude models less than GPT ones in my experience, but still ...)

My halftop macbook m1 max 64gb is doing all my ai locally, i have not paid for any ai subscription for over a year.

things i run locally using apple mlx models: general llm, coding llm, text-to-image, text-to-video, image-to-video, text-to-music,

everything is holding up well. I may eventually swap the m1 max for a higher memory bandwidth device once they are available for a reasonable price in 6+ years

1) Right now I have Opencode Go Plus, Mistral Pro, Kimi. It changes. Kimi is not staying and I'm probably getting ChatGPT for a bit, last month I had Claude Pro. I stay around €100 a month total.

I generally use open weight models (Kimi K3.1, Mistral Large 4, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, Mimo v2.6 Pro is the current quiver) but I use closed frontiers enough to stay up to date.

2) I use OpenRouter if I have a specific need, audio transcription (MAI-Transcribe 2) being something I use often enough. Also using it just to test random models.

Not much local anymore except classifiers / decision models that I've played with.

3) Pi all the way.

4) I use Paseo to orchestrate agents, I have a couple plugins I've written for it that manages pipelines and such. I generally start a workflow with a simple skill and if it proves useful I like to make it deterministic if possible. Models be dumb sometimes.

6) No but I have some Paseo plugins for personal use, though it's very limited what I find useful. I also don't find that I want any claw type stuff at all.

VSCode + OpenRouter + flavor of the day cheap model.

I spend about $5 a month with this setup.

I use OC with various subs, and am testing DeepSeek Harness, JetBrains Thinkrail, and Volt. Extending the harness with plugins is my main interest these days.

1. Personally? Claude monthly and I also keep money in the API service and slowly chip away at it with various apps and toys (I created a Fantasy Premier League app that does research and sentiment analysis as part of its runs and that costs money... but not much) . Professionally I use an unlimited Claude via AWS Bedrock.

2. I use both qwen 3.6 35b-a3b and qwen 3.8 27b on my Macbook Pro (M5 Pro, 48GB, 18/20). I use those with ollama and hermes (and Obsidian, to an extent)

3. Hermes Agent, Claude CLI and Claude in VS Code

4. No

5. Hermes Agent

I use a carefully curated selection of agents for my professional work. Agents to handle adversarial code review, planning, questioning, dev work, etc. I also have custom instructions for various repos that need them (where I can define things like repo norms that are not immediately obvious, data models where needed, etc.

1) None.

2) No.

3) None.

4) No.

5) No.

I have two $100/mo Anthropic accounts (watch out the single $200 doesn't raise weekly limits) and one $100/mo Gemini account. I have Opus generate review prompts for Argon and paste them into agy.

I tried setting up a script so Claude could automatically call agy, but it kept hitting timeouts, and letting Claude control that tends to burn my usage too quickly anyway (and if I'm not copy-pasting into different terminals, where's my value add in all this?).

Argon hallucinates, so I rarely use it for impl, but I've actually had better results with it than Opus for SwiftUI and AppKit work.

I try not to run more than three sessions at once, or I get anxiety about having to keep all the session caches fresh and end up typing silly things into some of them every 30-45 min so they don't expire or auto-compact.

2x Claude Ultra accounts, 2x ChatGPT/Codex Pro. Couple of local hosted models for quick stuff (text formatting, TTS, etc.)

I'm sticking with Default CLI/Desktop apps + built my own to combine them for my specific workflows. Used previously OpenClaw and Hermes but it seems to fall apart when you give it any real work. Ending up giving up because I just don't have to tinker / fine-tune it.

I will say, I enjoy Muse a lot for some reason for personal things. I don't overshare anything I wouldn't mind saying in public.

Within the last month, I basically use Claude Design exclusively for front end work and Codex for backend work. Codex just works but sucks as design. Claude is great at design (with enough references) but can't seem to actually get anything to completion.

I've got a somewhat sophisticated self made setup:

1a) OpenAI API subscription, integrated into an office suite + media pipeline I wrote 1b) OpenAI codex $100 mo plan

2) Current count, 318 additional generative models across LLMs and then media generation of image, voice, music and video. The LLMs are mostly Qwen variants, and the media models are pretty much all the popular media models. These are organized, managed, and API operated locally through WanGP (open source model host) and two additional apps I wrote. One of those apps is a mobile phone pairing remote live video processor, so one can use their phone like a remote live camera at events, and the other is a plugin to WanGP so my software can securely operate WanGP remotely.

3) I use OpenAI Codex in a terminal as a coding assistant. Through that same account I also run the OpenAI Desktop app, and that integrates with my web apps through WebMCP and two additional types of agents in my apps: 1) all my UIs have knowledge assistants that explain how to use the UI they are associated, and they know more complex workflows that UI is a component. 2) My apps have "method actor agents" that are conversationally programmable experts located on specific interfaces, which users then tune to be experts in their work tasks. That's like a smart assembly line worker waiting to be told what they are making. Then, through WebMCP, external agents will interact with my app resident agents, and together they act. Which is kind of amazing. So, in a way, they create a harness through their collaboration, which also includes the user, collaboratively.

4 & 5) no.

My work interest is in creating an environment that promotes deep intellectual flow. One could use my setup and automate a bunch of things and sit back while their brain rots. Or one can also participate in the work at an interactive creative stream level, where the agents and software are doing work but all the creative and impactful decisions delegate to you. You're in complete control over a swarm of virtual expert personalities that work for you, and you make their decisions. The work is office and media, which is broad.

1. Claude Ultra, ChatGPT Pro 200, SuperGrok, Kimi Pro, Cursor Pro, Google AI Pro, Muse Code High Usage. It comes out to ~$500/mo, mostly from Claude+ChatGPT

2. I use OpenAI/Anthropic APIs for various workloads (app features, automations, etc.), but not for personal inference/coding. Recently both of these providers started giving $200/mo in API credits, and OpenAI already gives free tokens, so I don't usually pay for this usage.

3. I always use the provider's preferred CLI: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Grok CLI, Kimi CLI, Antigravity CLI, Muse CLI. I use this with herdr to manage everything, and then a small custom app to keep track of my usages since I hit limits quite often.

4. No. Just the CLIs. For very large projects I've found Claude Code to be the best -- it can very easily manage many subagents.

5. I've tried OpenClaw, Hermes, Dots, and Muse. I really just haven't found great use cases for these tools

I use Claude & Codex for most of my personal coding/projects. For the other providers I mostly want to have broad experience with different models/harnesses. It's very interesting to see how each performs and what kind of tasks they do/don't excel out. The only con of having cheap plans is you really can only give them simple tasks.

---

At work I use AWS Bedrock w/ Anthropic + OpenAI models at API pricing. Each employee is given a rolling 28-day budget w/o access to Fable/Astra. I use the same Claude Code/Codex CLI + Herdr.

Only GitHub Copilorpt for documentation. Sponsored so cost nothing.

We built our own harness local & cloud models, test it out: www.vekmem.com

Claude opus 5.5 + Codex Astra for review using Rex as multiplex/terminal.

1. Claude Ultra for personal, Claude Max for work, Codex $100/mo

2. OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Luna, and testing out models here and there

3. Claude Code and Codex for the respective subscriptions. Played with OpenCode and Pi some as well

4. I've tried a number of these tools and settled on my own tool (not released) to oversee my agents

5. Played with OpenClaw and Hermes in the past, cool ideas but execution fell flat. I currently use Dots and Duet for little things (mostly monitoring communications). Dots is much better than Duet today but I hope Duet gets better.

1) Claude Code (Claude Teams Premium seat) plus pi.dev (self-hosted GLM-5.3) at work, Claude Pro at home. Opus 5.5 Extra effort for ~99% of the prompts.

2) Not really, messed around with Openrouter and Deepseek for some stuff that Claude refused to do

3) I use Claude Desktop (Linux) and a heavily modified pi.dev at work VSCode as IDE. At home just use the iOS app and Claude Desktop (Windows).

4) No

5) I have Hermes Agent setup at work and home but don't really use it.

At work, we're using Kiro. I've got no complaints.

In my personal life, I'm extensively using Hermes. If you look at some previous comments you can see what I use it for. I genuinely think personal AI agents are the future, the way I feel when I use it is how I felt when I tried out the first iPhone. In 5 years time, I think most people will have a personal AI agent in the same way the most people now have an e-mail address.

1. Claude Max - two (personal and work), ChatGPT plus, OpenAI (PAYG at work), Gemini PAYG (mostly for automated transcription). I could probably cut my personal Claude Max account, but hang onto it for the constant stream of personal project ideations.

2. Yes, per above

3. Mostly Claude Code, occasionally OpenCode and Codex. Rex/Ghostty as the interface to it all.

4. Yes, lightly, a custom orchestrator

5. Not actively, have tried most ex Grok Bot, but haven't taken the time

1) GPT plus, z.ai GLM Coding Lite-Monthly Plan ( legacy ), Opencode Go

2) personally, no. At work there is a Gemini Enterprise and Kiro Pro+ subscriptions

3) pi.dev inside herdr; both at home and work. I just pile the APIkeys and stick to same harness.

4) mostly, pi-subagents has an orchestration mode

5) no.

I mostly work on problems at the intersection of manufacturing, mechatronic design, electronics, software and physics. So I'm not really building software per-se which likely accounts for the probably slightly weird choices here.

1. Claude Max (upsold me as of today); generally Sonnet 5.5 with the occasional Fable 5.1 when it gets stuck or I am executing a high value step; and Perplexity Pro (legacy).

2. Mostly local voice-to-text w/Parakeet Unified EN 0.6B via Handy[0] (awesome; use it!). Not for coding, but for note taking, AI interfacing, and general typing reduction and RSI avoidance.

3. None. I tried Pi and after much kerfuffle I don't like any of the harness interfaces. I find the type of work I do they are not very useful, because I often switch between variant approaches, planning, data, and don't want unrestrained context bloat.

4. No.

5. No.

I would add that I am very interested in obtaining good enough hardware to run this level of model locally at any pace, believe Qwen is basically there but too slow locally to use as a daily driver on my current rig, and can see myself making that investment in single digit years. Not right now, the hardware is overpriced for what it is versus venture funded cloud AI subsidies.

[0] https://handy.computer/

At work Claude Desktop with Opus 5.5. At home Deepseek Harness, 5-15USD per month. I don't like CLI harnesses. coz it looks too monotonous. I prefer default agent orchestration of the harness, since its their job to take care of it. not something I should spend my time and efforts on. If I did, high chance it will get out-dated soon. I do not trust agent platforms. Lethal Trifecta comes to mind.

Dont use it at all. Seems like a waste of time for what I do as far as I can tell.

I use Orca as an “ADE” (mostly for the multi-worktree interface and mobile app).

In my day job I use Claude Code & Codex subscriptions (Codex is mostly for review, second opinion, and as a backup).

Personally I use both oh-my-pi and Hermes with a Codex subscription. I tend to use OMP more now though, since I find its interface a bit nicer when working on the laptop.