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

1) None.

2) No.

3) None.

4) No.

5) No.

For my side quests at any given time I am subscribed to one or the other of Claude $200 or Codex $200 or both. I was briefly on 200+500. Getting to be a real expensive hobby.

At my day job I spend about $1000/mo at API prices. So like 5-10% of my hobby usage.

Hobby setup is I have a single "personal assistant" session which spawns sessions for each project or major job on a project and messages with them. I talk to the personal assistant over Signal exclusively.

Work setup is just a wrapper around Claude Code.

I'm yet to find any value in complex software factories and multi agent harnesses. If you know what you're doing, you can just use Codex or Claude for the core research and development.

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

None.

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

I have a few ChatGPT API credits. I think I've payed at most $40 in one year, using 5.4.

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?

Just gptel in a firejailed Emacs. I don't do tool calling. Mostly just code review (have personal scripts set up to get diffs and automatically redact stuff).

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

No.

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

No.

I'd like to try agent stuff using a local model, but it seems quite expensive to set up. I don't feel comfortable giving so much access to OpenAI/Anthropic.

DSH + 3xSpark + GLM5.3 Flash

I dont think i would need anything anymore. Its doing alot more than what i did 2 years ago in within 2 months.

1, work - claude team pro (not paying for), home, codex pro (for side hustle https://rolloutrhino.com/)

2, no, except at work where I have a whole agentic helpdesk system that self improves, creates documentation, and is quite awesome really. Pretty cheap to run also.

3, my own that I keep iterating on, but I do use the clis, though with codex, the app is just awesome, don't use the tui (its good, but the app is better). Claudes app sucks in comparison, though is often better than the TUI.

4, my own tools, mostly because I started on my own ones ages ago.

5, dots, It's kind of like a project manager for the side hustle, its really coordinating a lot of stuff between all the things I have in flight

1. Paying for Open Router only.

2. Local VPS: serve small models like Desert Ant, Laya, etc only (the VPS has GPU).

3. Hermes only: Stick with one, arch is converging.

4. No. Used to use Hedr but that's about it. I ask Hermes to do that for me. (or create custom Hermes agents by specifying graph in text)

5. Just Hermes: refer to #3. - Fun at home, build, automate, disabled gateways for online chatting becauese of bugs (not sharing)

Hermes, OpenRouter, . No Claude/Codex sub too expensive. Use them at work instead.

A key part of mine is using voice input to give max context quickly to my agents. I know some solutions exist, but on Linux they all frankly suck

So I made my own. Including patching onnx myself to run parakeet model (way better than whisper)

Fully FOSS: voiceio.dev

Inference: combination of Opus 5.5 (best model in the market) and local models (DeepSeek 4.1f 1017 and GLM 5.3f) running on 3x DGX Spark.

Harness: Primarily Hermes Agent across desktop, terminal, and phone (via Telegram). I have also tried OMP but find it a bit clunky to use. Hermes tui + tmux are my favourite tools and Hermes works well with local models.

Orchestration: I haven’t seriously worked with it yet, but starting to use herdr with Hermes. That is as much “software factory” I get.

I use Claude, on a Max plan.

Have a server at home, so mosh into it and run Claude Code at the lowest level. Use Blink off the iPad.

For normal work though, I have a bunch of services set up to run Claude —-remote-control in every one of my projects, so I just use the Claude app on my phone and iPad.

Also maintain and run https://github.com/common-pattern/claudeflow as a service the bigger projects - it’s an orchestrator that reads GitHub issues and starts a Claude one-shot, automatically handling the routine stuff like CI, commits, PR landing flow etc.

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.

Codex and Pi, both with custom model provider pointing at the (currently free) Hetzner Inference API. Mostly for understanding code and prototypes + refactors, fully vibe-coding stuff in languages I know well just isn't fun so I have no use for that.

1) 3x $100 , swapping between openai/anthropic

2) DeepSeek when even OpenAI complains about cyber security stuff.

3) Pi in Emacs (Pillish) and a yet-to-be-published pi-deck on top which makes it more like herdr with more features.

4) custom pi orchestration. Mostly 2 tools: `do` (fork conv with question) and `delegate` (new pi session with question)

5) no

I like using Cline the VS Code extension. It can use local models and local inference with Ollama and tons of external inference providers like AWS Bedrock, Vertex, etc. It asks for permission to read webpages or run commands. You can give it whitelisted permission to just read your files which is what I do. If you want, you can put it into ACT mode and give it permission to write to files but I avoid that. If you use something like Bedrock, it shows you how much the conversation costs. It works great with Claude for coding but if I'm doing something super small I might use a local Qwen or Gemma model.

My current setup is Herdr + oh my pi + pi. Then I mostly use oh my pi's "prewalk" feature with Opus/Sonnet as planner and Deepseek Flash 4.1 as executor. I use OpenRouter to access the models.

This setup is working really well for me and provides a good balance of cost and efficiency.

Here is a summary of the comments from this thread. Updates will follow to include latest comments too.

https://techaddo.com/posts/ai-agentic-setups

For personal use: Claude Pro, Opus 5.5, occasionally API / usage credits. Outside of that, some smaller local models (lately poolside)

I still use emacs, I run agents in buffer or in different terminal tabs. I like pi but only claude is approved at work, so I mostly stick to that for consistency.

I'm use 1-3 agents at a time, not more than 2 on the same branch. I have some pipelined workflows but I don't run swarms.. I'm on budget!

Claude Pro for personal. (Kiro at work.)

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

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

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

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

My challenge is revisiting AI-gen code months later and making sure the AI has the context from our previous work.

How do people handle this?

Do you keep everything in the same conversation thread?

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

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

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

1) Opencode GO 10euro (claude max at work payed by empl) 2) Online opencode 3) Opencode harness is better at keeping your costs low but claude code on ultra code is simillar to agent orchestrator 4) Agent orchestrator 5) Ive tried hermes agent but my little server cant hold it :(

I use Claude and codex and use my own orchestrator to run them. I also used to have open code for a while but the recent codex and Claude models are token efficient so don’t need additional models.

1) 10$ opencode go for personal work and a GitHub copilot at work 2) tried some llama stuff but otherwise nope. Don’t have the bandwidth to make it usable. 3) pi + herdr 4) no 5) no

Can’t say I need much more than this.

I use Paseo for mobile / desktop UI, and as an agent runtime for some automation in a dedicated Hetzner box.

I try to keep the harness setup simple and portable, I use Claude Code or Codex with their subscriptions, I invest a lot of time in my skills which are shared between them.

Disclaimer: I am the Paseo maintainer.

Copilot in VS2026 + GPT5.5 configured as a custom model (API Tokens). Same as it was 6 months ago.

I really want to use 6.1 Terra, but the way copilot is set up in visual studio proper, they don't handle reasoning models correctly (or maybe my install is screwed up). Eventually, I will dust off that old winforms project and get my custom harness working with the latest responses API contract.

I prefer (pre) paying for tokens. You can offer me all the proof you want but I'll still never believe that those subsidized tokens are always the same as the ones I get through the API.

No subscriptions. Using pay as you go Muse Spark 1.3 contributor version set in medium for everything from infrastructure management to pure coding in Pi. No orchestration and no agent platform.

I only use genuine intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

t3code on my mac and omarchy, connected to my VMs with tailscale, that runs inside my own proxmox cluster.

I get to separate my work, have a lot of compute, manage it from anywhere, and also have my agents go bananas in their VMs.

I also run 1x Claude Ultra, 1x Claude Max, 1x Grok with X Premium, and 1x OpenAI sub.

I think the biggest leverage move for me was to get the VMs. Now I get to group my work better, and give my agents a lot more power by running more freely.

t3code has been a solid boost as well. It did hurt really bad tho, because I have been a terminal nerd for a long time. But the speed I've been able to achieve across a lot of projects has been crazy with t3code.

1. Claude Max with Opus 5.5 and the ChatGPT $20 plan, I have a few thousand bucks of credits since they reduced the Codex plan so I’m using it for all the bulk data tasks that it would be a waste to use Claude for.

2. ChatGPT Image still looks really bad to me so I use Gemini Image. I tried Argon but it really didn’t work for me so I just use the image model at API rates.

3. Just the default Claude/ChatGPT desktop apps. I used the command line tools for a while but the desktop ones are much easier to use when working with images, and you get the usage down the bottom.

4. No, I think this is all a big gimmick. I barely use subagents. It makes sense to have multiple people at a company with different roles due to their different capabilities and experiences - but when the models are identical clones then why not just have one do the whole job? I only use subagents for bulk data tasks because otherwise they get distracted chitchatting with each other.

5. No, I haven’t tried them yet. What’s the benefit over ChatGPT or Claude?

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

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

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

1) Claude Pro (the $20/mo tier). No other subscriptions.

2) I use models on open router occasionally, primarily GLM and Deepseek models. I’ve experimented with Qwen locally but the models that run on my hardware are too dumb for extended use cases and too slow for quick questions.

3) Personal use: Primarily Zed. I use employer paid Claude Code in the day job but it eats tokens at a rate I’m not willing to pay for for personal use. I’ve tried OpenCode but their security track record is uninspiring and I’m way more defensive about my personal hardware than my employer is about their hardware fleet.

4) No

5) No

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.

I currently use a custom harness forked out of codex that has a lot of token optimizations and bug fixes. It connects to agentcron.ai mcp for kanban boards.

I use Claude, glm , Kimi, codex and also outside of coding grok bot.

I’ve been building a harness and so use that and frequently benchmark against others.

I’ve also built tools so agents across accounts and across apps (Claude > codex > grokbot) can all communicate with eachother.

I use Circus Chief to orchestrate workflows that use various combinations of Claude, Codex, Muse, z.ai, and Grok subscriptions. When one subscription runs out, Circus Chief falls back to the next. You can configure tiers to control how that works.

Full disclosure: I’m the creator of the project.

https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief

I'm a solo developer. I'd hit walls with openrouter (sonnet/opus/sol) + cline

Now I'm running qwen 3.8 FN + omp + https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

This combination has pretty much "solved" node/react coding for me, running locally on dual RTX 6000, 200-800 tps depending on concurrency.

An incredible time to be alive.

Just pi with some custom mcp for search and web. Oh and Hermes but limited use

Currently on a GLM sub and will need to decide whether to renew in 3 months.

People are complaining about the new plans usage limits but I do have a -50% discount so idk

Claude Ultra, No, Claude Code, Claude Code can orchestrate agents, No, but I run Claude Code on a VPS of its own for some things.

We have an OpenSWE agent on Slack at work but it seems horribly expensive and slow for anything I want to do.

Cursor + Grok for serious engineering work.

Local Qwen and custom harness to experiment.

My own agent: https://github.com/fluxmoot/fluximp

I primarily use DS v4.1 Flash @ deepinfra.com with less use of GLM 5.3 Flash and GLM 5.3 @ friendli.ai

I use a locked down (i.e. many tools disabled; shell especially) setup of oh-my-pi in benchmarks for comparison.

im midday through building a 3rd party multi device coding and everything harness with some unique hard to replicate features that should really help for successfully building amazing stuff reliably.

despite some of the stuff ill need to do as a consequence of wanting to keep some of those tricks private necessarily requiring that i kinda have my own byok open router for zdr providers endpoints only, i think its worth it.

theres a lot more i could say, but i hoping it can wind up being a cult favorite in techy/professional circles even if im planning to do something like 50/month for core plus pass through with hair cut on usage based costs. cause despite the large theoretical market, i think taking a page from sublime text for product stuff is likely the best way to roll.

i just want nice tools and recurrent income thats stable and mine. if both groove together, thats the dream.

Work: we rent our own GPU and have our own model(Q3.8-FN), so... free tokens :D We use OpenCode as a harness

Personal: OpenCode with my Deepseek API account.

Usually I do everything inside Herdr

1. max 200 on claude (3x) and codex (1x) 2. yes, mistral / glm / deepseek via openrouter and some others 3. custom 4. custom 5. no

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. 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.

For software development, I am using Kilo Code (https://kilo.ai) extension on VSCodium, with Kilo credits that gives access to hundreds of models at API pricing.

For day-to-day tasks, I am using Goose (https://goose-docs.ai) with OpenRouter.

bit late of a reply, but I run this simple stack for some time now, and I'm enjoying it quite well: https://stack.yiin.lt

1) What AI subscriptions are you personally paying for?

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

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

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

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

3) What coding harnesses and interfaces are you using? Are you sticking with the default CLIs or IDE integrations, or using alternatives like OpenCode, Pi, Aider, Muse Code, or custom-built harnesses?

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

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

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

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

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

No

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

No

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

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.