Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup? | Hacker News Reader

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

63 pointseggbrain74 comments

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?

-----

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.

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It used to be more interesting and elaborate, switching between different models. I used to use Cursor, then Codex, but since Opus 5.5 came out, I just use the Claude IDE. I got rid of all my skills and just set it to medium. Then I vaguely talk to it about very high-end things that I want, and it comes back with magic. Rinse and repeat.

I'd say the biggest trick is just to tell it what complete looks like. Be very specific about what you want it to come back with once it's done. That gives it a good idea what the goal is. It'll automatically create subagents and all that stuff. Although if you have money to burn and you're doing something large, you can tell it to just go wide or boil the ocean.

Also, make sure you're working on at least five different things. Otherwise, you're sitting around for one agent.

I firmly believe that those using out-of-the-box Claude Code or Codex are likely getting the most cutting edge features of agents anyways.

What do you mean by Claude IDE?

Yeah I was thrown off by that as well. I assume they mean just Claude TUI..

I have a similar story as OP, for me its the Claude Desktop, not claude code.

Claude Code Desktop. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop

1. I've been using the $100 github copilot tier but am looking for something cheaper, as my usage is waning somewhat. I like to hop between models for comparison, but openrouter always seems to end up being way more expensive for the flagship models. I also keep a GPT Plus subscription for voice, until someone has a comparable offering

2. No outside models yet. Working on a setup for that. Sometimes I throw some money at openrouter to check out the mega-cheap options.

3. At home I really like goose (TUI), but have been messing with opencode (TUI mode)lately which is also nice. At work I use Zed with a corporate claude subscription and it's a good setup.

4) Not really. I tried some of the opencode swarm plugins awhile back but they didn't seem to work right. In general I don't really have the energy for messsing with a new plugin ecosystem. I also like to work in a _tight_ loop, conversationally as things are being built, steering all the decisions. I have next to no desire to hand a larger task to a "team of AIs" to replace my input with more AI.

5) No

I drive a lot and spend a lot of time talking to GPT voice workshopping ideas, talking at a conceptual level, looking up things I'm curious about, and discussing design and problems I'm having, sometimes even work problems. I use goose for all kinds of stuff, mostly infrastructure and debugging for now but I've written a couple programs with it as well.

1) Only ChatGPT Plus at the moment cause I'm between jobs and couldn't justify all the subs. Grok gave me three months at $30 when I tried to cancel so there's that too.

I wanted to really keep Claude but ChatGPT voice mode is too good tbh and no other comes close. I wish I could use Opus 5.5 for coding.

2) OpenRouter PAYG, mostly for experimenting with Chinese models like Deepseek and GLM, usually for stuff that Codex or Grok refuses to do.

Had been looking into NEAR and Venice for completely private information processing (like emails) but haven't set them up yet.

3) Codex, and OpenCode as harnesses basically.

4) I really wish I could decide on some agent orchestrator without trying them out for weeks. I like my tools highly powerful and trying to find recommendation for this online is hopeless because it's full of opinion from people who never used a terminal before.

5) Grok Bot for running experiments with supplements, calory tracking etc.. Tried to set up Hermes a couple of times but hated it every time. Just gave Rakazo a try yesterday and still hating it.

Gosh, I dream about the time when you could look at a github repo and make a decent guess about the quality of the software.

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.

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.

Claude Code (and Codex too I believe?) can message other sessions these days. I just run one session per repo and they talk to each other directly when the frontend needs something from the backend and vice versa. This has removed most of that back and forth for me and eliminated the need for orchestration tools.

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.

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 want to make a joke about that last line so badly.

I've had the same experience as you with Claude, and I have to choose a single subscription, so I'm on Codex. I definitely wish I had access to Opus 5.5 right now.

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.

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.

I use a custom Daemon. I tried OpenClaw and Letta and it was like emailing your AI. I have a 64gb Mac m1 Max and the largest model I could run in openclaw was a 27b because its not built for local AI, it's built for API. I wanted something that you could chat to, collaborate with, build, evalutate the code, make corrections, build, repeat. I couldn't find anything that didn't come with massive latency so I just made my own. Now I'm running a 125B A3B model at 30 tok/s using SSD Streaming and my agent is instant with no latency and can do everything I ask. I use Aider for programming, exa for searching.. I'm happy with it.

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.

What is your experience with Raven or such meta-harnesses, does it consistently outperform vanilla?

I get the same "one-shots" from the vanilla codex as codex under raven. It took some work to get the orchestrator to send good refinement prompts, and it still doesn't have good taste. I need to bring that with my own review of the code. If you notice you send a lot of repetitive refinement prompts it's worth it.

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.

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/

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

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.

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 ...)

Where do you find that T3 Code is strongest and where it is weakest?

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

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.

try https://www.droneship.run

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) 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.

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.

What are you using to host GLM-Flash?

Didn't set it up myself so my info will be meagre, but I think it's litellm and a big enough nvidia card. We use it for development but also for internal applications (where smaller models might escalate a task to it when needed).

Obviously not feasible for (just) personal use, the model is too large for consumer hardware.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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

$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.

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.

Nearly identical setup except I splash some Chinese models in there like DeepSeek v4.1-10-17 and GLM 5.3

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

have you tried https://www.droneship.run

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.

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.

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

1) None.

2) No.

3) None.

4) No.

5) No.

watch_out_were_dealing_with_a_badass_over_here.jpg

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) 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

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

DeepSeek Flash with kicad + autorouting churned out a couple of working PCBs with minimal prompting, and customized ZMK itself for some custom input devices. At least for casual stuff this is a solved problem

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

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

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

Keeping it simple.

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.

Claude code is all you need

Yes, given that you can route the other models into it this is sadly true.

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)

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.

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.

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

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