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

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)

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.

devin

1) anthropic ultra; single sub

2) payg on opencode

3) standard claude code and opencode driven by t3 code

4) nope

5) grok bot - at work, to manage my tasks, and to highlight what happened on slack when i was off; random one offs there

I built a "software factory" on top of pi agents so I can automate most product dev work

moved to openclaw for everything, with occasional claude usage for tricky bits. I have $200 of both codex and claude subs.

Openclaw is the answer to question "do X if Y happens". An agent per each type of Y channel manages the flow and memory. And user input is just another case of 'Y'. It is a very powerful model I am having lots of fun with it.

the plumbing is a chore though, thinking of trying out grokbots to see if they solved it.

1.a) At work: I can choose between Cursor and Claude on a meter. Been using Cursor for a long time and happy with it until they started to force Grok down our throats. I was happy with Composer 2. Recently switched to Claude Code. The company also runs some open weight models in-house and I have been using them through Claude Code itself, with VSCodium as my Code Viewer. I almost never need anything stronger than Sonnet at work - 80% of which is YAML and Terraform these days (or rather markdown, if you really think about it).

1.b) For personal stuff I maintain an Opencode GO subscription, USD40 tier. I also have a Google One subscription which is supposed to have some AI capabilities, haven't tested it yet.

2) Besides my Opencode GO subscription, I sometimes add a few bucks to use Zen. It's rare: my USD40 is usually fine for the month. I've recently started using Nvivia NIM free tier models for some time insensitive tasks too. I have a Qwen model available on my Mac (M1 PRO 64GB) but haven't found it to be useful, as I need my laptop for everything else I'm doing beyond inference.

GLM 5.3 Flash and Deepseek 4.1 Flash do most of the work for my personal stuff. Nemotron does the time insensitive stuff, which is mostly summarizing text. I've been using GPT Luna 6 a lot because it's currently cheap as hell, so I'll often talk to GPT Luna and hand off coding to GLM or Deepseek. I find that Luna communicates MUCH better than the Chinese models - I assume because it does not go through the extra language barrier step between English and Chinese. GLM, Qwen and Deepseek are incredible tool callers, but their prose is insufferable.

3.a) At work I'm using Claude Code for the Anthropic models and Opencode for the self-hosted ones. Ditched Cursor recently. I've been meaning to try to integrate the self-hosted models into Claude Code but haven't yet, so hand-offs between the two harnesses involve a lot of markdown.

I've switched out of Cursor because A. they've been bullying us into using grok for everything and B. The company setup would not support the use case of mixing the self-hosted and closed models in the same harness - this limitation is on our side.

3.b) For my personal stuff I've been using mostly Hermes. Some actual coding goes into Opencode, often piloted by Hermes itself. I'm using Zed as my code editor, but with the AI features disabled. My opencode subscription is actually configured in Zed, but I prefer the UI without them.

4) No. I don't really need them. I run 5-6 parallel sessions at most, otherwise I can't keep track of what's being done anyway. Each parallel session is on a different task, so I generally don't need them to spit enormous amounts of code. I rarely have to wait more than a few minutes for a task to finish, and I'm always thinking or writing or managing something else in between anyway - not looking at the screen waiting.

5) Hermes. Generally happy with it - despite it being extremely unstable between updates, with frequent regressions, weird UI bugs and half assed features (bot mode, anyone?). I have 3 distinct instances (laptop, home server, VPS) doing different things - all hooked up to the same memory provider (honcho) under a single user profile, and a handful AI profiles on each. All have limited access to my Obsidian Vault, which is synced between them using Obsidian Sync.

I generally use the laptop instance for day-to-day use: planning work, assigning tasks to myself and to the other agents, capturing ideas, light coding, etc. The homeserver instance manages a limited set of features on the server itself, from upgrades, documentation and more devopsy stuff to organizing files, managing transcoding queues, etc. The cloud hosted version automates is not very used yet. I plan to have it pilot an n8n instance I keep to automate some boring stuff, like filing weekly tax records and automatically forwarding bureaucratic e-mails, nothing fancy.

Right now, it's Claude Code on Opus 5.5 w/ herdr to manage multiple sessions at a time.

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[dead]