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

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.

Claude Code Ultra as the primary agent, Codex Pro as a second-opinion reviewer, with Rex as my terminal and multiplexer.

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

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

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.

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.

Only GitHub Copilorpt for documentation. Sponsored so cost nothing.

For now, I have decided to refrain from using LLMs because I consider the technology a very serious threat to humanity. So my answers are:

1) None

2) No

3) None

4) No

5) No

here is my production grade setup for agentic ai on windows 11

- setup windows 11 with Rufus boot to disable online MS account creation https://rufus.ie/en/

- [download window 11 x64 iso from here ](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11)

- then download vmware workstation pro (you ll need to create a free account to get the download link on their website)

- install vmware workstation pro

- turn internet off

- plug your pendrive in with the rufus w11 x64 iso on it (mind ya, this pen drive ll first need full formatting before burning a w11 image to it)

- press f2 to reach bios in vmware settings and make it boot from pendrive

- turn internet off on your machine (DO NOT keep it on)

- install w11 (keep a 100gb for vmware)

- without updates it ll load real fast and you wont need an MS account (rufus takes care of it)

- while it installs, download revo uninstaller pro on a separate machine https://onefiles.net/9d170d01078634b5 (latest version 5.4.x) and put it inside a second pendrive / portable hdd

- once w11 loads, it ll ask you to enter a password, keep existing password blank and enter literally anything for a new password

- voila you are done with w11 setup inside vmware

- now connect the 2nd pendrive with revo and install it (need to clean uninstall many tools, hence we need this one)

- now go to search bar and type check for updates and update everything on w11 inside vmware

- next stop get unigetui from ms app store or from here https://devolutions.net/unigetui/ (it is a package manager responsible for installing just about everything else with auto updation of all packages)

- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance

- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)

- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python

- the open unigetui and search for the following packages vlc, winrar, winhance

- winhance is the fully customizable debloater you ll need to turn off all telemetry (we ll debloat after installing all the other requirements)

- next go to ms app store and install python or open powershell and type python

- mind you this installs a python version manager that lets you install and uninstall multiple python versions

- after this python version manager is setup, install a specific version of python like

``` py install 3.13 ``` - next we need a node.js version manager, use fnm for it

https://github.com/Schniz/fnm - once installed, it may need to be added to environment variables manually

- once again choose a specific version of node.js and install it using

``` fnm install 23.12.0 ``` check fnm --help for commands - next we need a java version manager, use jvms for it

https://github.com/ystyle/jvms

- pretty self explanatory

- now install git and again it ll give you some trouble over environment variables, command not recognized etc, fixable with some gpt help

- at this point, we got git, node version manager, java version manager and python version manager and are ready to rumble

- install vscode/ visual studio whatever

- install codex

- install claude

- install opencode (both cli via npx and desktop app) and check their plans out https://opencode.ai/console/go

- install ghidra , ghidra-mcp (mind you open ghidra-mcp first because it only works with specific versions of ghidra and java) this is the reason we installed a java version manager

- check out setup for rea https://github.com/morluto/rea requires npx setup for rea and ghidra both, read documentation

- run winhance, check recommended settings under optimize and every other tab and restart the vm a few times for full debloat with 0 telemetry services

- congrats you have a full blown agentic environment at this point (if I missed anything i ll come back and update)

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.

After trying so many different setups, now I just use Claude-- the only thing interesting about my setup though is that I separated a "work-claude" and a "personal-claude" install on my laptop, which isn't officially allowed and took a bit of wrangling. But I basically had to do it legally.

1) Claude code (Max) at work. Claude code (Pro) personal account for side projects. I do still have a ChatGPT subscription. I'm tempted to cancel it, but I like their app. Gemini is bundled somehow into my google subscriptions. I use it occasionally, but I'd be just as happy to not be paying for it.

2) I do use Openrouter for side projects that need an embedded AI. For example, on Halloween I made a talking pumpkin to greet trick or treaters as they came to the porch.

3) Mostly code. I've tried muse, grok, gemini, codex, and pi w/ openrouter, but I always come back to code.

4) no

5) I have a grok bot account I use to manage personal stuff. It organizes my email and calendar, keeps me up-to-date on news, does health tracking, trip planning, and shopping research. As an example, there's a website where I order lunch for my kids. I like to know each morning if I need to pack their lunch, so I have grok bot log into the website and sync it to my calendar. I then get a notification in the morning with everything I need to start the day, like whether to pack lunches, what the weather will be, or if I need to help my kids study for a test.

$100 ChatGPT sub $100 Claude sub

Most coding via Opus 5.5.

Codex for text and some non-coding tasks.

Separate virtual desktop and clone on dev drive with VScode for each task (much prefer its diff tool and use it to launch builds etc).

I never come close to running out of tokens because I still do code reviews often enough to throttle usage.

Tried just about everything over the last couple of years. Settled on the unified Cursor, Grok, Grok Bot plan for about $200 / month. Doing everything within herdr for programming and Grok Bot for all non-programming related AI life stuff.

It's a solid groove. Grok Bot helped me get so much stuff off of my plate.

1) Claude Ultra, Codex Plus, SuperGrok, Gemini Pro.

2) No.

3) Opus 5.5 on high for all the work. Reviewed by Codex by default. Additionally by Grok and Gemini (agy) for critical work.

I switched from Claude CLI to a custom-built harness because I got overwhelmed by walls of text in parallel sessions. Now I have a canvas per project where I spatially lay out cards. Each card spawns an agent in a worktree. The chat with it is condensed to WhatsApp style chat bubbles with all the thinking and tool calls folded away. The result of a card is a demo, usually a narrated video that I can comment on to trigger another iteration. Everything voice first, I mostly speak. Phone companion so I can keep working on the go.

I used to work with up to 6 Claude CLIs in parallel and couldn't go further. With my custom UX, I can do 20+ with fun. Now the bottleneck is actually my machine, so I added remote worker support to my harness to distribute the load to more machines.

(I open sourced the harness in the hope of sharing the fun. If you want to try it: https://github.com/sadilek/obeya)

4) No Paperclip or Munder Difflin or anything. I actually think it doesn't make sense to create persistent agent personas. Just spawn an agent when needed, give each full access to all skills and docs, and they'll figure it out.

5) Hermes Agent running, sending me regular news research reports, but frankly, it's just a cronjob and the whole Hermes setup isn't really adding value for me.

Mostly Pi, using a variety of models, but mostly GPT 5.6 line of models.

I try to use open weight and cheap models as much as possible.

I'm playing around with some ideas on top of pi durable. Cascading contexts exposed over http. Mostly deepseek, glm and kimi in there. https://github.com/resolveworks/key

Herdr, Pi, OpenRouter. I haven't found that I've needed much more than this for quite some time now.

1) None

2) Openrouter. I don't have a preference right now. All the top open-weight models work fine for my projects. Currently using Mistral.

3) I used pi for a while and lately I started using openrouter's ori coding agent. Working great so far.

4) None

5) None. I tried Muse for a while and it was too slow to do anything useful.

Google Antigravity CLI using Gemini Flash 3.8 most of the time. Amazing what it can do.

1. Two Claude Ultra, ChatGPT plus, Gemini through credits

2. Pay-per-token for work through Vercel AI Gateway (mainly same models + grok, but trying out others too)

3. Claude Code, Codex & OpenCode

4. Homebuilt https://svall.dev/

5. No

For personal stuff, a $10/month OpenCode Go subscription with OpenCode, mostly running DeepSeek Flash. I've yet to run out of tokens.

Work provides an enterprise Claude subscription for work stuff, I've never hit any limits on that either.

https://github.com/mkornreich/llm-desktop-electron with OpenRouter. I love Claude but Anthropic is expensive and too restrictive

I'm using Claude Code (Ultra) across a multitude of tmux sessions, over two or three laptops – largely so long running actions don't happen on the actual laptop I take with me (nothing worse than waiting around for an agent to finish before you can leave a café). To make it a little easier to visualise across those sessions I built https://belfry.robgough.net which is like herdr in some ways, but just uses standard tmux.

I also gave in after seeing my co-founder use it, and gave GrokBot a go. I use this for everything that's not coding or design... so marketing, email reading, right now it's currently inputting my meter readings to my electricity company after emailing the building management company and getting photos back. It's super useful at little chores that eat up time. I have it daily check the status of my various projects and services. I love it tbh. I've also built my own version, which I might move to... though now it's all set up it's quite sticky, and it already spotted an error my accountant made on some taxes so it's already saving me money and I'm feeling quite positive about it.

I'm getting a bit frustrated with having to run things on my laptops though -- it feels a little pets not cattle, and wish it was all in the cloud. I'm toying with building out an agent factory, but frankly there's no super-cheap way of doing this so I'm holding off, though I can see me building a tool that connects those laptops to it creating sandboxes with Apple's `container` (which I'm using successfully on my grokbot replacement).

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

1) What AI subscriptions are you personally paying for? (Claude, ChatGPT/Codex, Cursor, etc)

No. I moved off of subscriptions earlier this year. I don't trust the subscription model from any frontier lab. Just look at what Anthropic has done. The first time I tripped a safety classifier on a seemingly irrelevant task, I canceled everything.

2) Are you using models outside (or instead) of those subscriptions? For example, pay-as-you-go APIs, OpenRouter, or locally hosted models.

Local first. I have a box running Muse Spark on my desk. My main inference box is a launch day DGX Spark (I saw the hardware shortage coming) and has my entire local AI stack. OpenWebUI and everything that feeds it. I moved away from SearXNG and started using SlopSearX (it's quite good).

Everything else goes to Openrouter. I use few models but GPT-6 Luna is my go-to, sometimes I switch it up. Really depends on the task I need to perform.

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?

Github Copilot for work. It's meh. Personal projects and general personal use? I started with OpenCode and have since migrated to Pi (omp specifically).

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

I thought about it. I haven't really felt like I would derive value from changing my workflow and tools. It took me a while to find a good mix of utility, control, and efficiency and haven't wanted to change it until at least next year.

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

I have a dedicated Mac Mini to run Hermes. It is pretty much integrated into my entire life now. I could live without it, but automating general purpose things is the entire point of why I put that machine together.

How is this different from this time last year? Radically different to say the least. The pace of change has been EXTRAORDINARY to say the least.

Mainly CC Max with some API calls to OpenAI for different things.

No harnesses right now. Ok occasion using models in LocalLM.

Haven't got into agent orchestration much other than Paperclip earlier this year.

1/2) OpenAI Business Premium subscription and a locally hosted Qwen 3.8 Flash Next running on a DGX Spark.

3) I use both Opencode and Pi.

1) 20$ Claude subscription. I used to have 2 20$ subscriptions but not anymore.

2) My main model is Deepseek flash via the API.

3) Claude Code CLI inside OpenShell. I like Claude Code's UX. Lots of custom skills and scripts.

4) No

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/

i dont have one

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

Im curious how hardware/firmware engineers are using Claude, et. al. for work. Tools/MCPs that are worth it?

1. Claude Ultra, three accounts. Mostly to get enough Fable usage.

2. Early in experiments with locally hosted GLM Next, not writing code with it beyond experiments.

3. Claude Code, system prompt, minimal skills; mostly bash scripts for common actions.

4. tmux send-keys for messaging between panes.

5. No. Claude Code does that, too.

My own harness (nothing intricate, but to my taste), DSv4 1017 on my own hardware

Keeping it simple.

1. Using ChatGPT with a Business Premium seat (not personally paying for it).

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.

Codex (Pro x 1), no outside models, custom harness, custom orchestration, custom agent harness.

I avoided building anything custom until I had to, and I avoided adding more than a single agent until I had to.

My preferred way to use AI for coding has been to work closely with a single coding agent with the code open. That changed wth 5.6-Sol and a handful of skill files. I stopped needing to watch closely to keep it from fucking up the codebase. With the right request, that combination will get the job done 9/10 times.

That unlocked a new workflow: as soon as a change is requested, a coding agent reads it and gives me a PR. I want a complete proposed code change in front of my eyeballs by the time I open the change request myself.

So I have a custom solution in place to manage a handful of agents aligned with this workflow.

Custom solutions are so cheap and easy now... it's really hard to put up with solutions that are only mostly right for the job.

- LLM reverse proxy

- agents work in their own lxc spawn automatically in a proxmox node, where they can go wild without sandboxing or isolation, network is firewalled too

- all sync sessions and everything to a centralized agentsview in a realtime, where I get to track and watch it from anywhere on the go

- i just ssh into the lxc if i needed anything

- different harnesses depending on the task, maki is great one, but I use others

- I also have other stuff but I won’t mention it here regarding the tokens for obvious reasons

I tried most of the tools like herdr or paseo or desktop clients but they never clicked with me

1.) Claude or ChatGPT Chatbot.

2.) Text Editor or IDE.

3.) A compiler/interpreter/SDK and potentially other dependencies.

Super lame and boring, but that's basically it.

As for my day job, it's the same minus #1 -- AI is banned.

Opencode with $10 Opencode Go plan until his heinous Clammy Sammy lets me have enough Ram for a local inference setup.

I run

2) kapitsa + pi + Qwen 3.6 35B a3B q4. pi is the harness, kapitsa is the inference engine

people that I considered intelligent have associated Qwen with "chinese cloud" when it implies not using a cloud at all. I think that's weird. I think there is a "western" centric view that limits perspective to using A cloud, instead of aspiring for locally run

1) I also pay for Claude, I should downgrade again to the $100 plan, thanks for the reminder, but currently the $200 max x5 plan

4) no. I handroll my agents

5) I use Claude desktop as an agent platform

For personal work. I use Orca.

1. Claude Code with $20 Claude subscription. This used to be a terrible value but now it's a great value, probably because of the IPO. I do a lot of coding and other things and I rarely get close to my weekly limit. I mostly use Opus 5.5 medium. Codex with gpt used to be good value but recently I canceled it cause I kept reaching my limits.

2. When I want a "different pair of eyes" to review things I'm working on with Opus, I use Pi with other model providers and just pay API prices.

3. Deepseek harness with a deepseek API key. Really great value.

4. I have a Muse $5/month subscription that I keep as a backup although I don't really need it.

I also use cloud agents to setup reoccurring jobs. For expensive agent runs, like visit 5000 websites and extract something from each, I would set up something cheap with an agents sdk and for the model use either Muse, Deepseek, or GPT-6-luna using their batch API.

I maintain all my dotfiles and agent files / context in a github repo so that I can switch easily between harnesses and providers.

Claude code is all you need

1. Claude Max

2. No (only the API for projects)

3. Buzzpot.app (my app)

4. No

5. No (I tried them, but couldn't find a use case for them)

devin

herdr, opus 5.5 (max), codex (max), and I am still refining how they all communicate, currently codex became unwakable at some point while claude can be woken with a message just fine.