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

Embarrassingly, I don't have one yet. I'm mostly still writing code one keystroke at a time. I've used Github Copilot to translate between languages and look things up, but haven't trusted it to write new code or fix anything.

Claude Fable is now good enough that I should be using it. The latest Claude version is said to be comparable to a mid-career graphics programmer, which is about what I need. Six months ago it wasn't good enough to use for such work, and probably would have made a hash of my code. There's been progress.

But Anthropic's business practices are scary. They have a reputation for cancelling accounts for random reasons, offer rather bad terms, and have no customer support. I have a strong aversion to services with a reputation for cancelling services arbitrarily. They will apparently cancel based on their system's guesses as to what you're working on. Sometimes they guess wrong. What I'm doing (metaverse clients) is so far out of the mainstream they may guess wrong.

I'm currently stalled signing up for Claude because their verification email system can't get to my inbox. (Some problem with their using Constant Contact, a spam system, to send transactional emails to my own domain, which, long ago, I had blocked at the Constant Contact end. I think. The verification email never touches the inbound mail server.) It's very important to Anthropic that you sign up with the "right" email address, and it may not be possible to change it, so using some disposable address is not a good idea.

Suggestions?

1) Claude ($100) + Codex ($20) seems to be a sweet spot, with Codex being able to generate images and do reviews of Claude's code

2) If I want to do, say, summaries at scale, I reach for Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite

3) CMUX with folders per project + Stream Deck that shows me which agent has finished :)

4) Just Opus 5.5 orchestrating its subagents

5) Hermes. I find at least one 24/7 machine with agent running, that you can reach from anywhere to be worth it. As your personal assistant.

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My day job has a Claude account, but for personal projects, I have been playing with different models and environments on my home server. My current setup is Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, Strata, and OpenCode/OpenChamber.

I already had a bunch of my projects on the server with with code-server (VS code in a browser) set up to access it, so switching between code-server and OpenChamber is just switching tabs.

However, I've mostly been managing it from my phone - the OpenChamber app is awesome. I still switch back to my laptop occasionally - it's a better interface for reading and writing code, and also the desktop OpenChamber app has a built-in browser that it can manage, which comes in handy.

Oh, and separate from all that, I have Facebook muse set to automatically lower prices on a couple things I have on FB marketplace.

I'm (somewhat unexpectedly) retiring [1] soon and need to come up with an affordable setup for when I no longer have an organisation paying for my tokens. I use Github Copilot through work, which is actually not bad, but the affordable personal subscription doesn't include many of the models I like to use. I tried Claude, Codex, DeepSeek, and a few others. I think I'm settling on the following:

1. OpenCode Console (I think this used to be called Zen). It's a pay-as-you-go system, but I get access to almost any model at open market rates. I'll then set up an affordable regular monthly top-up. I looked at OpenCode Go, but that had the same issue as Copilot: access to only a subset of the cheaper models. 2. I use the OpenCode TUI and desktop app sometimes, for general questions or exploring, but I mostly use Editor Code Assistant [2] with Emacs as my go-to harness. I've set up ECA to use OpenCode as a provider, which was a little fiddly compared with more mainstream options, but it's working now.

My needs will (probably) be light in retirement, but I like to use models to add features to Emacs, write scripts, work on a couple of small websites and maybe dabble in progressive web apps or mobile apps for a food bank I help run. This setup gives me flexibility (lots of models to try) and won't break the bank, I hope.

[1] https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts/2026-10-20-retirement/ [2] https://eca.dev/

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.

1.) None anymore. They're all turning into increasingly poor value for (my) money. I need AI on my own schedule and don't want to be paying for compute I don't need and end up waiting for limits to reset when I do need it. If I was to use one though it'd probably be Opencode Go.

2.) Yes, I'm currently using OpenRouter. It's good for quickly switching around and trying different models, but I currently have it constrained to just 3 models and 1 provider. Truthfully I could just use that provider directly, but I like retaining some flexibility.

3.) I've been using OpenCode for over a year. I think it's an incredible tool and its wide support is a massive boon. It's really easy to pull in skills, tag the skills, and switch providers. Their more recent changes turning the CLI into more of a GUI has been quite annoying (wdym I have to tap an X in my CLI to close a tab), but not enough for me to (yet) look elsewhere.

4.) Nope, no idea what those are but thanks for teaching me about something new.

5.) In EU (DK) so we don't get access to Dots or Muse like everyone else. I have used Grok Bot and I really like it. It's super helpful and I'm using it as a personal assistant. I delegate tasks to it that I just can't be bothered doing manually or can't figure out easily (e.g using some accounting tools, figuring out cryptic documentation, etc.). I've also used Hermes Agent, but I didn't like it as much. It's great intent but the UI/UX is really not it. It looks like it was taken out of a 90s hacker movie and I'm sure some people like it, but I prefer tools that look polished and focused. I might switch back to it though if something was to happen to Grok Bot.

P.S the models I primarily use are DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM 5.3 Flash. If you use skills to their full potential they feel SotA to me (my reference point for SotA being OpenAI models we use at work, since we have an enterprise agreement).

1) Claude ($100) and ChatGPT ($20)

2) No.

3) I mainly use Claude as my main, Pi (with ChatGPT) for any automations. I manage them all with herdr. I cd into a path, kick off a claude/codex/pi session, then kill the session and manage it from anywhere with iceghost. (https://github.com/sharkjets/iceghost)

4) Negative.

5) I tried openclaw but found it a waste of my already scarce tokens. :D I build my own runners when I need a loop or cron-based automation.

I use the Local harness in vs code with a GitHub copilot max plan. Gives access to the best models from OpenAI and Anthropic (I use 6.1 sol, Astra, and opus 5.5 for most things). The Local harness has granular keep/undo and nice interface in general for reviewing changes, which is important for mission critical code. Unfortunately the copilot team is trying to force the less capable, more YOLO-mode "copilot" harness on people going forward. The community is somewhat getting them to walk that back but they seem to be missing the mark on what differentiates their product until people complain.

I also use chatgpt desktop for some tasks through a chatgpt teams/business plan. I briefly tried to set up codex cloud and it was a mess, not following startup instructions so I gave up.

I'm juggling multiple claude ultra subs, multiple codex $500 a month subs, antigravity for argon, plus API rate deepseek 4.1 flash, mercury 3, and abliterated large v2 for red teaming.

I work across multiple models and harnesses using a really simple redis-backed message bus called "nova-bus": https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/nova-tools (open source).

With just this message bus, I can coordinate AIs to work together at a normal pace (worktrees, subtasks etc...), but past a certain point the AIs can't keep up and I need to use a sprint card system I developed to coordinate work.

With this sprint system I'm able to work 200 cards wide (each card is around 30-60 minutes of LLM work in a session) across a fleet of 20 machines linked together with tailscale and ssh.

Full system is here: https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/nova-sprint (open source)

It's been very effective at getting high throughput, but afterwards I find that the resulting code can be a bit of a pastiche from different models working in isolation, thus a good pass over working directly with models to clean up and harden the code is necessary.

I find that using nova-bus to coordinate multiple model/harness review of codebase in very effective at increasing code quality. Each model sees things the others don't.

I've Kiro and Antigravity installed both are vs code but forked by Amazon and Google and brought their multi agentic coding environments. Then I installed Claude extention on both. I follow spec-driven approach (https://kiro.dev/docs/specs/) all agents are instructed to follow it strictly. When I plan sometimes I evalute all specs with Kiro, Gemini and Cluade. Each has their share of work and improvements, each spec in my case end up as requirments, design and tasks.md files. Most of the code is generated by Claude and Gemini Argon and its pretty solid.

1: personal ultra and I have subs through each company I consult with. I also have subs to all other models as well. Cheaper tiers. Daily is opus. Use other models for other work.

2: only some decision models for testing. Experimentation.

3: herdr and all cli.

4: all custom built. Yes.

5: yes my own. - personal assistant.

An example. I can feed it shorts and create one pagers.

My workflow has changed since the 5.5 models dropped. They need less skills and guardrails.

I can set up my orchestrator to run unattended for longer with simpler goals.

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

None. I've used Claude and GitHub Copilot in the past.

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

I'm currently using Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on local hardware.

> 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?

I occasionally use Cline in VS Code, but it's rare.

> 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?

I built custom agents on top of RubyLLM. I primarily communicate with them via email. One of them has access to a Redmine project board where it can pick up tasks and complete assignments. That agent also has non-sudo access to a sandbox container for development.

Claude + Codex, both from work.

Just those.

https://github.com/oscscull/quarterdeck built my own harness. I had trouble with both claude and codex. In particular, managing multiple tasks in a kanban, syncing between my machines, making sure work is done on the right machine and can be triggered from either. Making sure I ping reviewers, meeting reminders, todos. Parking tickets til conditions are met or time elapses. Automated notifications when I have meetings. I have just kept adding features as I want them. This kind of software is so easy to make nowadays, I don't really think there's any sense in "launching" it for others, but I'm using it all the time. I highly recommend doing so (building your own personal work management software in 2026).

I guess this is also in some sense an agent orchestration tool, I don't use any of those.

Don't use.

I use the Zed IDE with Opus 5.5 pro subscription. I use to have access to Fable with the max plan and I miss it, despite what everyone is saying I still find that Opus does weird things. Just yesterday I pointed it to a queue suddenly being twice slower to be processed in prod. A select SQL query called thousands of times per minute became slower because of a data increased. Opus proposed several non trivial ways to optimize the query by forcing some execution plan. I just kept the result in a variable for one minute, as the data don't change often. x1000 perf with 3 lines of code. I would have expected it to say that this query didn't have to be executed that many times in the first place. It codes well when you tell it what to do, but it is still dumb about what is the real problem (and so the real solution). That's worrying me a bit because Opus 5.5 clearly is SOTA, so better than any open weights models, and I really want to be able to run smart models locally on my laptop for independence and privacy reasons. So, if I still find Opus dumb now, when will I have an open weight model better than 5.5 that can run on my Ryzen 7 AI 350 with its Radeon 860m and 32GB of RAM? ... This summer with all the releases of DeepSeek and Qwen I was hopeful I could have it for Christmas, but it looks like I will have to wait much more...

I figure my experience might be uncommon here so I'll offer it: None, no, none, no, no.

1) none

2) Local LLMs on an M1 Max (Unsloth, LM Studio, occasionally direct llama.cpp). Muse Glimmer (because it is good at what it is optimised for: interactive coding sessions). Qwen 3.8 27B occasionally and a couple of other things for fun (an LFM MoE, experimenting with Nemotron Bolt 74B-9B, enjoying the really super Gemma 4 12B QAT when working on creative photography research or non-code planning).

No openrouter (yet) but that will definitely happen.

3) Currently focusing my attentions on Pi via Paseo (and trying Pendant). Pi is just much better in smaller context sizes, and it is the right fit if you are keen to learn from first principles.

I tried OpenCode first. I couldn’t quite get on with it and what ultimately made me switch was trying to understand its terribly messy source code.

4, 5) I am mostly using AI as a coding sidekick so I don’t really have much need for orchestration yet. I did some experiments with Osaurus (really quite impressive) and I actually think that is almost enough by itself, except that I want a little more control over the sandbox container.

I feel that my usage pattern is still settling, because I am not keen to surrender all of my coding to the machine. But I am trying more purely “directed” coding to learn the process, and finally beginning to get a feel for how I will work with that.

- Antigravity (AGY - Google Ultra $100/month), mostly gemeni flash but I benchmark Gemini Astra sometimes. My main driver because it’s pretty good at search compared to setting something up with DSH.

- DeepSeekHarness (DSH) Desktop using:

—- with pay as you go DeepSeek tokens, more expensive to use during my night/Chinese daytime, otherwise very cheap

—- oMLX on my MacBook driving mostly a Qwen 3.6 35b A3b MOE (mostly used for benchmarking a less capable model)

I mostly do custom subagent programming and can trigger subagents in AGY and DSH easily enough. DSH supports a Python coordinator orchestrating DSH subagents as conversations via RPC. AGY only supports a sub-agent orchestrating other sub-agents but it works well enough at this point. I plan on releasing my subagent framework soon (called autofab in pypi), which is basically a specification driven code development agent system (using existing agent harnesses rather than implementing my own).

I tried goose, OpenClaw, Claude, codex, etc…and they didn’t really work for what I needed. I might get a $100/month ChatGPT subscription to go with my Google one, primarily to get a different perspective and benchmark openAI models on codex (Claude doesn’t really support what I need it to, otherwise would go for that instead).

Tried the popular agents and paid models for some time, and now settled with a local model (Qwen3.8-27B-Q_6) and opencode desktop.

My work doesn't really require ultra super-intelligent models, or one-shot solutions. It's a standard python API, web app and some strict compliance requirements and tons of test cases. I have time to give the Q27B a few iterations. I monitor the progress and give directions while it keeps chugging off for about 30 mins for each medium-hard task. But I like the results. Exactly what is needed. It also allows me work on high-level stuff.

DeepSeek Harness using DeepSeek Flash API

Nothing else, DS is smart enough to do everything I ask for and more, never hallucinates and never disappoints. Apps in Rust, Swift, Node, we even designed a new language better suited for LLMs, a compiler, and it runs beautifully. Haven't coded a single line since May 2026 and I will remember that date as the day AI took over my mundane job as programmer and promoted me to architect or director of my own apps

A custom plugin to ring a bell whenever a task is finished and a gong when a question needs an answer, that way I can play backgammon or mahjong in the meantime

I can't be happier

1) Claude ultra. I ended up using 3 accounts in tandem for some big work I needed to do recently, but the other 2 accounts were only open for a month.

2) I have a cheap OpenAI sub I sometimes use codex on, but just for small tasks when I'm out of tokens on Claude

3) Lab - a frontend I made that let's me run loads of chats in a single UI, I get notified when they need me, if I turn off my PC and load it back up everything picks up where it left off. It'll run compound workflows comprised of multiple prompts+macros, and centrally manages all my agents/skills and MCP servers - they're associated with projects, categories of project etc and rolled out to everyone when changes are made.

4) Hivemind - another one of mine, hivemind's a small self contained binary that acts as a collaboration layer for the agents+me. I send messages to everyone, groups or individuals. They can also ping me and send me desktop notifications if they need me urgently. I get a lot of mileage out of this where file reservations, resource locking etc are concerned. Stops them stepping on each others' toes.

5) No, 100% of my work takes place in Lab (with loads of Claude + Hivemind sessions under the hood)

I use AI primarily through work, I don't pay for a personal AI sub.

I do have some OpenRouter credits but I mostly use them sparingly to try open weight models out for small personal projects.

I currently interact primarily with Claude Code, but most of my async workers are on Codex.

The orchestration part is custom. I talk to a "chief of staff" Opus instance to ingest various workstreams (Jira tickets, alerts, personal ideas, etc) and turn them into beads. It launches workers to tackle individual beads using Remuda, an agent launcher I wrote at work in 2025 and open sourced earlier this year: https://github.com/yendo-eng/remuda. I configure profiles in Remuda that launch containerized agents using my preferred harness and model. I update these profiles as the pareto frontier shifts. Currently it's GPT 6 Luna max for most tasks.

It monitors the workers and has them go through at least one round of agentic code review. It surfaces PRs for me to read once they've passed agent review. It then either ships them or hands them off to my coworkers for codebases where I'm not allowed to just merge PRs.

Around this workflow I had it write a small collection of skills and scripts to grease the wheels and make repetitive actions more reliable.

Since Remuda supports several terminal multiplexers, I've swapped out the backend 3 times: tmux -> herdr-tui -> herdr-core. There's experimental support for Rex but I'm waiting for it to mature a bit before I try and daily drive it.

It's not nearly as polished as some of the software factory setups and fancy GUI orchestrators I'm seeing, but it's light, hackable, and so far the bitter lesson has kept this working really well for me so I haven't felt much of a need to try anything else.

I have been trying out Muse for a while but it hasn't found a solid place in my life yet. Still too unreliable and too many privacy concerns to justify giving it a lot of access.

1 - Deepseek for non-important stuff, 50 bucks seems to last forever. Claude annual 200 bucks sub (my main one), and Gemini 20 buck a month sub to complement Claude when i run out of usage. There is some kind of extra Argon allowance at the moment, so it's pretty solid.

2 - Deepseek is my pay as you go one... I only use it for small stuff, mostly as a way to validate API use on some implementations.

3 - Claude code and antygravity, I have not gotten anywhere near one of the other harnesses, i see them as the React of AI.

4 - No

5 - No

1) I use 2x ChatGPT Pro 200, and a Claude Max 200.

2) I use other models via Open Router, but ChatGPT beats them in value (at the moment) thanks to Tibo's resets.

3) I mostly make Claude coordinate a group of Codex agents. They've set up a communication channel between them, and Claude acts as the coordinator and a second verifier. This saves me time because it's easier to talk to one agent than a group of agents. Codex parent session does only "comms" with Claude, and all the other agents run as sub agents.

4) For non coding usecases, I use https://www.ctlflow.com. This lets me run dozens of agents on tasks like equity analysis. The information a swarm of agents can surface from a large data store can be quite surprising.

5) I have tested OpenClaw, but now I just use ctlflow.com or claude + codex.

I use Claude Code with Opus 5.5 via ACP inside the GNU Emacs Agent-Shell.

I used Open Code, but they stopped supporting Claude, so I was searching for something different (I had a free 20x Max plan as an open source maintainer). First used Claude Code and then found out about Agent-Shell. Now I'm using the Claude Pro plan.

I use pi as a harness, and Paseo as a Mac UI (because I need a Ui).

I tried a bunch of models, but so far deepseek flash from October is just dirt cheap; and roughly on par with the frontier open weight models.

It’s still somewhat behind closed weight models (I only know Gemini Argon) in that it produces lots of text that is approximately correct —- frontier models seem to be very good at producing concise text that’s very correct.

I pay per token, using an EU hosting provider (melious.ai).

But I can fill in the gaps myself, so for me developing for fun, this is enough.