2. No

3. Lynx (lynx.railcode.dev) & CLIs (less and less since Lynx)

4. No

5. Tried a few but never stuck around

Opus 5.5 high is currently my main driver for planning. Via the "poteto-mode" (adapted from Cursor's pstack) skill, more Opus, Sonnet, Astra, and Sol (sometimes also Grok) subagents are spawned for the actual implementations. This is really powerful and often implements features completely e2e with proper verification and testing etc.

My local qwen model can dual serve chat and decisions on the same weights. I mainly use chat here for critical data like health & finance topics that I'm not comfortable sending to a provider I don't control as well as having my local Home Assistant installation connected to it (only via LAN, hence a local modal is a good fit here). The decision part of this model is used for generic content screening, advising, and (re-)ranking [1]. I'm also planning on integrating this setup into various other things like all my email accounts in order to have them sorted by relevance and grouped/labeled. Again I wouldn't be comfortable forwarding ALL my emails to a third party provider since this is a massive security risk.

And yes, I built Caudra, a custom harness / coding agent that fills many gaps I otherwise had to build with various plugins [1]. For instance, multi account support with strategies such as draining the sub account that hits reset soonest.

To answer your last question regarding broader platforms: I'm currently building this into Caudra as well so it can be turned into more like a swarm of agents [3].

[0] https://github.com/tensorninja/ninfer-4090

[1] https://caudra.ai/features/decisions/

[2] https://github.com/caudra/caudra

[3] https://github.com/caudra/caudra/discussions/2

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?

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.

(shameless promotion) Many people here are looking for tips on how to improve their setup. I asked my agent to go through my setup, put it into 100 tips and tricks and to let anyone's agent go through their setup and see if there are any good ones that they haven't tried yet.

So give your agent this: https://virpo.io/levels and ask it to see if there are some tips you could try.

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. 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/

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).

All my codework and projects are built without any use of AI.

Haa, and once I had to use a Google AI API to integrate in one of my Projects... That's the only time I used it as an API!

If anyone feels that my approach is wrong or I should use any, please suggest me a good one!

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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).

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

At work I'm afforded a Claude subscription that is 5x that much usage and I simply cannot use even half. I'm not coding at all anymore at work, just driving Claude. It only needs a bit of direction.

I also use OpenRouter with OpenCode, and a homegrown harness I wrote initially without AI help but later on with AI help. But I haven't used this setup for a while. I swapped models based on the churn as reported by artificialanalysis.ai but they don't release as much data via their free API anymore.

I also can run Qwen 27B A3B on my NVIDIA 5060 Ti 16GB but I don't bother with that anymore either.

I don't use orchestration or swarm. Occasionally Claude spawns a few sub-agents as it needs more data and is preserving it's context window.

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

I haven't seen a lot of improvement by increasing the orchestration layers, honestly. Am I missing something?

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.

Opus 5.5 for 99.9% of tasks. Fable for the rest.

Harness: Claude Code plugin for VS Code. At some point I guess I'll switch to just the claude code app but tbh this is super ergonomic for me.

No agent orchestration besides literally just letting claude spin up agents for me.

No broader systems.

And I'm _massively_ productive with the setup I describe above. I say this not to gloat, I'm sure others have great methods but I do say this in case anyone is feeling overwhelmed by the options out there. My 2 cents is don't overthink it.

There's something to be said for the speed with which it gets word done - I take fewer "it's compiling" breaks, and lose my train of thought less frequently. What's crazy is that the speedy work it does is pretty much always correct - which is a reason why I don't feel the need to spin up claude-code and "ask the expert".

This speed & good-work combo is the DS signature IMO

For my harness, Deepseek Harness + DS-4-1-flash combo is almost too good to be true

2) No

3) Pi

4) No, I think these are token burners and makes it practically impossible to track what's happening from a human side.

5) My own tool: <https://github.com/PAndreew/pi_group> - the main benefit is that it's multiplayer so it functions as a regular chat app in which you can invoke Pi in a group chat. This way the agent can have a shared context, but it still have all the features like generative ui, internal browser etc. that other bolted-on solutions like Claude bots in Slack do not possess.

I'm using Codex, Claude Code, Kimi Code for different things, but most of my interactions now is with claw-like agents hanging off a self-hosted Matrix server in my VPN, and I expect to migrate pretty much all of my use to that setup because it's a lot more flexible. The agents have their own wiki for orchestration and increasingly I feel complex orchestrators are already becoming obsolete because the agents are good enough at self-organising with very little around them.

I don't use any of the agent platforms you list as it took a Kimi agent about half an hour to build something small and auditable that handles what I want it to do and load-balances/fails over between several providers for the backend.

They handle my finances (read-only), acts as a general assistant (and reads my e-mail), plan out my projects, manages my soon-to-launch podcast setup, runs several websites autonomously. The only reason they don't do more yet is that getting security right without kneecapping their usefulness is still a really hard problem.

It also let me connect to Requesty for my hobby projects and with that I can easily try any model, from any provider. That gave me a much better appreciation of how models perform, how fast and how costly, thanks to Requesty’s super awesome dashboard which is a pleasure to use.

I was only using Opus 5.5 before as I wanted the highest quality, but using smaller models you can get much faster work, and the difference in price is dramatic. I have now settled on Haiku 5 for simpler things, it’s nearly free while being really smart still, and for big things I use Opus 5.5 still but also Google Argon 4, it’s incredible as well and it seems to write more human text than Opus.

We also have a framework that lets us launch Claude (we could use any harness but for now only Claude) in our Kubernetes cluster within a devcontainer. That lets us ship heavy work off to another machine so our laptop is not overloaded with agents. It works great but we are not open sourcing this framework yet so I cannot link for now. There are some alternatives out there but most of them are out to make big bucks instead of providing a small but powerful solution for this problem.

I was using oh-my-pi, but currently playing around with Hermes as an alternative.

Exclusively using open router at the moment, mostly on principle around ZDR, and freedom to experiment with harnesses - but financially I'll probably have to compromise on this soon. GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek are the main models I'm using, with some OpenAI usage.

Tmux for remote access and session durability. I'd prefer to find a setup where I could access the same session through a web interface and seamlessly switch back to TUI, ideally spawning sessions through a web hook or similar. I'm going to take a look at Hedr to see if this can improve this.

Probably the two major things I'm planning to do next are looking at adding a bifrost VM that will hold all API keys, and centralise management of MCP configuration, potentially use it's skill repo stuff as well.

I also want to start controlling egress more - probably iron proxy, though tbh I'd like a solution that was relatively liberal whilst still mitigating exfiltration and prompt injection risks. Maybe I can find a curated allow list to use as a base.

Finally, I make a lot of use of open-webui, but it's disjoint from the agentic setup currently - it'd be nice to find a better way to share information/research from it into the agentic sessions.

My approach is to build the builder rather than the feature. So if something is off in the output I try to adress it through the orchestrator. Might lead to a bit overfitting but I feel like the results are quite good too far. Also really nice to be able to remove useless stuff with a single prompt.

Building a custom orchestrator for my workflow was quite easy. Like 1-2 weeks of prompting and now my work mainly consists of refining linear tickets in a claude / codex cli and then reviewing the completed MR on the other side of my orchestrator (through the custom GUI).

Codex usage limits have really gone down hill so I also now have a $10 opencode go subscription on which I pretty much just use DeepSeek 4.1 flash. I’ve found DS to be a great model - probably somewhere just below GPT 6.1 Sol but at a fraction of the price.

In terms of workflow, I discuss features with chat gpt (because it’s free and it has access to my project’s repo, read only view of prod logs etc, so can make informed decisions). Once we’ve agreed on how a feature should look I ask it to create a spike github issue. I then get another agent in opencode (usually DeepSeek flash or Luna) to break it up into implementation tickets.

When I’m ready to build the feature I can give open chamber a list of tickets to work through using the task plugin, so each ticket gets a fresh context. I try to build directly on the main branch and try to ensure we can always deploy to prod even if a feature is half finished (using feature flags etc to switch it off until it’s ready).

Once a feature has been implemented I get GPT Sol 6.1 to do exploratory / regression testing with a real browser against a test environment. This usually teases out a lot of edge cases I hadn’t considered and also gives me a chance to improve usability etc.

It often takes a few iterations of this (exploratory testing, fixing issues that are found, exploratory testing again…) before a feature is ready to release.

I can’t believe how far things have come since August 2025 when I first tried out codex.

Usually have 3 or 4 instances running at a time and lets me use LLMs from 9 different providers (and not using their libraries either). The low dependency approach was slightly limiting early on but now makes it very easy to extend and makes it very easy for an LLM to integrate new features or optimize existing ones.

I typically use Claude Sonnet for document-related tasks, and currently DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is my current go to for coding (it's insanely cheap on ollama.com) and I find it's still fast and reliable at very large context lengths. Previously I used GLM 5.2 a lot and before that was Sonnet for most things.

Humbug lets one AI delegate tasks to another and it can choose different models/providers when it does, so works nicely for getting second opinions on things. I haven't yet found a need for an agent swarm though - more often the parallelism comes from working on multiple projects at the same time.

One of the biggest unlocks for me in the last few months is having AIs write ADRs to capture design thinking as a project progresses. It lets new AI sessions discover the intent behind the current work and surface any potential conflicts that might arise with new requests.

One fun feature is the AI can control pretty-much any UI surface the user can control too, and it's quite fun to watch it edit files (you can watch it scrolling around the file in an editor) or use a terminal. It's a nice visual way to see what's going on.

2) I have a locally hosted Qwen model setup, but I only use that when I'm offline which is rare (eg long flight)

3) Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor (most rare now). I use default IDEs generally. I also run prompts from my phone via connected Codex/Claude iOS apps.

4) Just the native orchestration in CC/Codex (my larger projects include subagent prompts)

5) Atm, just OpenAI's dot. I used OpenClaw for about a month 6 months ago, but realized that the features would be done & better by the labs, so gave up and ported my work to Claude Cowork at the time.

Main use case is orchestration for my life & my projects. Manages email, tracks todos/deadlines. I could see the use cases growing with time as they add integrations + I trust it more.

2. I use both OpenAI and Anthropic models via api, openrouter for MAI Translate 2 (super cheap) and a small qwen model on a second laptop for hermes (mostly searching and summarization tasks)

3. used Zed with threads, but week ago moved to herdr-app + zed as code editor. oh-my-pi is my choice for harness

4. no

5. hermes: can't find a lot of use cases right now, instinct: super simple tasks like finding where to buy a product, tennis match schedule checks.

I previously had an open source grant for Claude and that was quite good as well. There is a sort of "just good enough" point that we're reaching where all the providers are on similar levels. Like cloud. Everyone reached feature parity with AWS. Now it doesn't matter.

I don't use Gemini. Google is great. I use AI mode in search for general knowledge stuff but honestly the thousand moving parts and unique ways in which their products break is annoying. I used to work at Google. They have amazing tech. But I came in through acquisition. I'm not a die hard engineer. I think they built from the ground up and everything is limited by the scope of the infrastructure. So they design APIs like that. Google itself was a single input box. Simple. But I think Gemini and the API needs work. They are going to do well as cloud infrastructure for enterprise. And their models will probably get widely deployed in all their own products.

2. No.

3. Claude CLI and Codex, but I rarely use the latter, and just call its review function from within Claude. If Anthropic didn’t require API usage for external tooling, I’d be interested in trying a lighter harness, but it’s not that big of a deal for me.

4. No.

5. No.

2. I sometimes have questions I don't want to associate with my main account, I use duck.ai or chatgpt.com in a private tab. I also dabbled with self-hosting, but it's mostly curiosity, testing abliterated models, testing linux-amd integration etc.

3. Sticking to the defaults. My dayjob pays for Copilot, which means a Copilot plugin in IntelliJ

4. I haven't even looked into agent orchestration and swarms.

5. Not using agent platforms either.

Personally I own a Ultra plan on Claude and a 200 plan on Codex (400 dollars month).

I run them from their native desktop apps, no longer I use any terminal app to run them.

I have not opened a IDE for months now, any diff I need to check I use the Github PR.

In the personal level I use the agents for everything, basically the only thing that I still do on my computer outside of agents is consuming content like HackerNews, random forums, reddit or youtube. All the rest: sending emails, reading them, filling forms, configuring apis, submitting apps to stores ( run a couple of successful mobile apps), building them... Is all done by the agents on my behalf.

Crazy world we live in eh?

EXTERNAL: Deepseek-V4-Flash on Opencode via Deepseek.com with prepaid Tokens Usage last 30 days: $4.37 USD Uses: Application building for Flash-Next above.

1. None 2. see above 3. Opencode and PI 4. no 5. no

In the IDE, I install the KILO plugin to use as harness.

I use the Jetbrains Remote IDE feature to code remotely on a cheap linux VM at a cloud provider.

On the remote VM, I have a git repo per project that I open with the remote IDE.

The way I code stuff is to create a separate worktree for each task/prompt and let the agent run at it.

The IDE and KILO plugin lets me watch the progress of each agent and open the chat with each to provide input, instructions, etc. as well as review code changes, perform tests, etc.

I did switch harness at some point because I previously used Cline which was dog slow and unstable.

I do not use OpenRouter or anything like that.

I have dabbled a bit with local models on my MBP M3 but with 24 GB RAM, the models I were able to run were both too slow and poor quality.

My setup is probably hopelessly suboptimal.

I would love to get feedback and hear if there are obvious low-effort improvements.

When it comes to harnesses/orchestration I flip flop between raw Claude Code and subagents to my new favorite, OpenRig.

Where I have two rigs (Teams) which are Product and Engineering. Each of these rigs have seats for a model harness such as Codex or Claude Code. My product team is a Product Lead, Product Spec Reviewer. Engineering team is Lead, Dev, QA, Review. They send messages between themselves resolve Gitea Issues, open PRs.

And more or less yes, it's a software factory (I know I'm not gonna need it) but it's fun. I only talk to leads, mostly the Product Lead.

Use case I'm trying to build a SaaS with an Agentic core within the Staffing Industry.

2. Yes: I often have personal tasks that Claude refuses to do, so I have to use Deepseek-v4.1-flash or GLM-5.3. I typically stay with OpenRouter, but I've found a discount provider that offers a 2/3 discount and have migrated to them. The catch is the data is probably sold, but given that it has saved me $300 this past month for non-sensitive work (game decompilation), the tradeoff is worth it.

3. Claude Code for Claude. I used to use OpenCode for my API usage, but there are too many issues which have gone unfixed and too many weird issues that I became tired of working around, so I switched to Oh my Pi. I'm not a fan of it either, so before my next big run with open weights models, I will probably rewire Claude Code to use these Chinese models.

4. Claude Code's subagent feature and workflow (subagents, but queuing up >200, and running 8 at a time) are sufficient for my needs. I had Claude build some bespoke workflow orchestration tool for managing many OpenCode agent instances, but it is a single shell or Python script that is essentially the equivalent of Claude Code Workflow.

5. I don't have a use case for them, so no.

Also I have a Cursor Pro plan but I notice I'm not using that enough actually. Only for backup and for file-level changes.

2) Others: I have a DGX Spark running Qwen 3.8 27b (for confidential/sensitive work, narrow coding and narrow agentic work), but it's often running ComfyUI instead, with models like moss-image/minimax h3 for image/video asset generation.

I also use various APIs incl. OpenRouter, but only for production, user-facing agents.

3) Harness: Claude, sometimes Codex

I tried OpenCode, did not like it the CLI nor the results, as compared to Claude. I want to but haven't really tried Pi yet.

4) Agent orchestration: only custom tooling now, heavy user of Mastra for custom agentic workflows incl. production agents. Fantastic open source framework (not affiliated).

5) Agent platforms: Tried OpenClaw earlier this year, when it was such a hype. Did not like it. Every update something broke, and I spent more time fixing things than I got value out of it. Switched to Hermes Agent running on a Mac Mini (I know...), and I'm still using that for various Hermes agents for all kinds of agentic tasks on the go, and so is my wife.

#1 use case is capturing videos, podcasts, and posts online that I like, or meeting recordings, transcribing them with whisper, organizing them on my NAS, ... It will also distill skills from useful info I indicate, which are then pushed to my skills collection git repo.

#2 use case is website maintenance (pushing new blog posts etc..) for a family member.

#3 delegating work to Claude for coding on the go. I prefer to do this via my Hermes agent rather than the Claude app, as it has the full local context & tooling (e.g. iOS simulator, screen recording the end result and sending it to me when done).

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.

Outside: I have some open weight locally on my 64G ram M5 macbook, mostly for personal stuff that I don't want to send to cloud (or claude). Mostly using Gemma through oMLX, because it feels more street-smart than the more coding focused models, experimenting with Qwen-flash-next through Strata, because the streaming of experts really pushes what size of model I can run

Harness: Claude code, mostly, I trust anthropic, and like the remote integration with their mobile app. Being able to say "prototype me this and that ui" for personal project and seeing it and testing it on my phone is awesome.

At work for the api-provided llms, I am trialing opencode and pi harness, but don't have much to say, we mostly used claude-code up til now.

For local I mostly use Hermes, not for any of the big features, just because I want a nice chat interface (I am mostly talking through my health problems and trying to get my appointments in order) that already has basic tooling integrations out of the box. I.e. getting OpenWebUI have search tool was pain. Adding i.e. mcp for my todolist or calendar to Hermes was smooth.

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.

On there i run claude code and codex via ssh and zed‘s ssh connection feature to take a look at the code where necessary.

I map a range of ports so I can take a look at previews.

Agents just continue running when I close the lid.

Claude Projects is pretty nice and integrates with Claude Artifacts for design tasks. Projects remembers context, repositories and working directories so I can always pick up work in the main orchestrator chat and Projects branches in different chats as needed. My only gripe is that it's really intransparent when Claude works locally. Sometimes Claude doesn't have enough permissions and I need to prompt it to do stuff explicitly on the Mac.

pay-as-you go on openrouter. use latest DeepSeek or Gemini.

I created my own minimalist/task based harness that checks out a jira issue, downloads attachments, runs sandbox docker containers with configurable gh/local repo as volume mounts depending on jira labels, can load agent instructions from local/remote depending on jira type (triage-bug, dev task, reproduce-bug, security) has scoped/temporary access to targets (e.g. dev k8s cluster, aws/gcp/azure account, ssh, splunk). dynamic secrets loaded from external secret management system/env vars. since a lot of the corp repos are littered with skills, rules and other crap that bloated the context, I also set enabled a way to ignore repo/org agent instructions.

I have 2 repos for storing my personal/corp agent instructions and I 2 separate harness configurations.

I am salaried making > six figures and all I do is press the think button on the funny little screen.

I largely assume that all the micro optimizations people are making to their "agentic setups" is just bikeshedding. There's not much else for them to think about now. Probably makes people feel useful if they can get 0.5/1% improvements to their job-doer robot.

That being said, I've found peace in just embracing it. Work didn't require me to think anymore, so I've found some of that in trying to get very very good at a videogame. Quantifiable improvement, problem solving, adapting to new scenarios, etc.

But for work all that is needed is "computa, fix the bug".

Edit: To clarify, I spent my entire teens studying this field. Starting at age 11. Over 15 years of this being the sole focus in my life. I enjoyed the process more than anything in life. But that process is no longer what is being asked of us. I see no point in continuing to obsess over a field that, frankly, doesn't exist anymore. At least not in the shape that I have an ability to derive fulfillment from. If you still can, I'm both happy for you and envious of you.

I am not an AI bro. I don't like AI. It hasn't made my life better in any way shape or form. In fact, it has only made it worse.

Edit 2: I also learned how to read music, started playing the Piano, and started to learn how to properly draw. I don't find any of these things as fulfilling as I did programming pre-AI, but they aren't nothing.

My biggest gripe: If I tell it to make a change in layout to a page and there is a "collateral" change, I cannot tell it to "change that back", because it will spend an hour digging through git history diffing stuff that is not related in any way. Once a conversation has started git diffing it never ends, all down stream tasks become a treasure hunt in git history.

I also think that Argon-tokens are super stingy.

Regarding commercial solutions:

- Subscription: Google AI Ultra (testing for 1 month rn to see what i can get out of argon, after that probably going back to Pro package)

- Harness: Antigravity IDE : from what i have tested on commercial harnesses this one i liked the most so far

Regarding selfhosted solutions:

- Inference host: Im owning a 5090 and im running the models locally - mostly use qwen 3.8 27b q5 atm, its a bit "slower" even on a 5090 but it fits the vram i have available while also being quite good in terms of result quality

- Harness: I tested alot and ended up writing my own harness ( https://github.com/laughingmandev/loa ) since none of the ones i tested (yes i tested openhands, hermes, etc...) did work well for me. While my own harness still needs some enhancements, its especially made for long running / complex tasks while beeing hands off (not permanently prompt jokey'ing ) and sturdy enaugh to work well with selfhosted/local run inference.

I use the gemini4argon/google agent atm to work on a c++ simulation and image asset generation for a game im working on. The complexity of this stuff just is to big for a local qwen 3.8 to fully grasp (its not that good at c++ either). Local image diffusion also is not that great.

For other stuff of low to medium complexity im working with my own agent/harness/setup - especially if the data is anyhow security relevant since im not leaking anything outside. From writing scripts/tools to analyzing infrastructure or discussing architecture.

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/

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.

2) no

3) Defaults: claude and codex

4) I've built my own custom system including web UI which helps me manage agents powered by claude and codex in both headless mode and running through an automated pipeline including bug reproduction, dev, code review, qa, etc... It's proving very useful, and keeps getting better as models improve. Opus 5.5 is phenomenal.

5) I tried OpenClaw but it didn't stick for me

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 ...)

2) I primarily use Qwen 3.8 flash q2 on an R9700 with 4x256k context. I also have some Openrouter credits as an escape hatch if I need it (usually to work on my local AI configuration, sometimes to speed up certain tasks).

3) Pi[1] with a suite of extensions and context files that I have built out myself for the most part, with a few external extensions. One of the main external tools that I really like for coding is openspec[2]. I switched to Pi from Codex because I liked the minimalist philosophy behind it, and because at the time I was using a 7900 XTX (which is now my primary desktop gpu, and I also use for auxiliary services like whisper and decision models), and I was having a hard time getting 100k context with any reasonably useful model. The default prompts of Codex ate into that a lot, and Pi was a much better match for the resources I had.

4) I use Herdr (tui)[3] to manage Pi agents. All agent to agent interactions that I do are ad hoc. I'll do things like tell an agent to spin up work in several other Herdr panes that I have opened with Pi in them, or I will do things like tell an agent to inspect the work of another agent and make sure that it continues to stay on task.

5) No.

[1] https://pi.dev/

[2] https://openspec.dev

[2] https://herdr.dev/tui/

For software dev, I primarily use my own harness/orchestrator (that I shared recently), and sometimes Pi. I switched away from Cline + VS Code primarily because code is being generated so fast that I needed to optimize for review.

My harness is modeled similar to my day job: dev team works on stories, tracked on a kanban, and I'm a code-review gate. For example I scrutinize control surfaces, but instead of reviewing the implementation: I skim it and ask questions.

Every now and then I check to see if other harnesses have what I'm looking for, but none seem to have a combination of:

- Strong sandbox - Particular UX (for mobile, code-review, basic IDE, and task management) - Code checkpoints - Great compatibility with local models

2) No.

3) Claude Desktop (home/work). Cut and paste when using Gemini or ChatGPT

4) No

5) No.

Claude Code Desktop on Windows: I like it. Simple UI that I started using about 2-3 months ago and have grown with it. Multiple sessions, virtual groups for sessions, etc. I can see my manual workload of managing things is getting larger so I want better project tooling. Some of the default selections tend to stick with what you selected first and I dont like those aspects (new sessions seems to default to your original/first session folder - so we need to clean that up or create some built-in /new-session skills, etc)

However, what I really want now is voice integration without having to click on the speaker icon and talk to it (or a way to keep the speaker icon depressed) . I want the ability to get off my chair and away from my screen and talk to it. This part is easy, I think, and would be a good start. To close the loop I would like to hear the feedback. However... getting the responses to have a 'conversation modality' instead of a 'verbose text modality/Claude speak output' may be a bigger challenge. The workflow will never be 100% display free. But if we can get the audio aspects worked out, projection could be to a pair of smart glasses (XReal, Apple, Meta, Google) - activated only when needed (read something or see a UI design, etc) and then pushed aside.

Anyone one have a minimal keyboard/display approach working for them?

2) None for now.

3) Claude Code CLI, but not always in a terminal I'm sitting in. I talk to it on Telegram and Slack for different projects.

4) Something custom that grew into a project: Spool (https://github.com/enes-alatas/spool). It runs long-lived Claude Code loops, each with a name and a mission. Each one wakes on its own timer or when someone messages it, works, and sleeps, and the session resumes with its context. Each loop gets its own container with an egress allowlist, and they message each other and me in a Telegram or Slack group. A web control room shows what every loop is doing and what it costs.

5) No, Spool covers it for me.

2) I have API usage via Together for a number of toys I have built for my kid, I probably could refactor this but it predates getting a Claude Pro subscription.

3) Claude Code letting it do the work, pure vibes and dropping to vstudio as needed.

4) No

5) Muse, I have it doing things like basic research, waiting on ticket windows and just being a personal assistant. It also does a really good job at scraping churning forums and blogs and has made a few thousand dollars in the last month just on bank and brokerage bonuses. It does all the record keeping and I just sanity check the dates, hold periods and do the account opening / transfer work. I'm eager to see Anthropic's take on this space and hope it uses the same Chrome integration. Muse's biggest flaw is that it runs it's browser actions from a datacenter instead of a local host and a real browser.

1. I have a $20 Codex subscription that is more than enough for my work. I use a 75-35 model where I used higher models (Sol/Astra for 35% of the heavier tasks and lower models 75% for other tasks. Sometimes I also use Free OpenRouter models for minor tasks.

2. I use many local models like Qwen3.8-27b/Gemma-4-26b and some 9B models. I also heavily use voice/vision models like Kokoro, QwenTTS for marketing and product videos.

3. Pi exclusively, which I have tweaked for my hybrid setup.

4. I have my own custom agent orchestration that routes between Codex and local models based on the task.

5. I used OpenClaw for a bespoke market research task once, it worked flawlessly.

I also don't see many differences anymore in the various frontier model - between GPT 6-Sol or Astra or Fable or Opus 5.5... Maybe my tasks are easy enough, or maybe I'm missing a lot here.

There’s an excalidraw in the reader

My manager described this as incomprehensible lol but it’s modeled on conductor but uses Claude code terminal and mods and glues a bunch of open source stuff with a cli I had Claude write. Herdr for sessions, nvim for code review / searching, cli invoked by /slash commands. Beads cli for task tracking. With multi repo support since I end up doing a lot at work across repos at work for a “feature” which is how I delineate chats now. And I’ve got a nice picker for swapping sessions so screen real estate isn’t wasted. Many incremental improvements the sum of which are compelling ime

Also : give out product agent notebook workbench : https://getspur.dev/spurlab to make all coding agent need to explore/grouding before coding with notebook

The only "issue" I have is (due my local stack choice) is I can only have one project running at once, but I feel like I will find a solution to this soon enough.

At work: Claude Code subscription, mostly with Opus.

After around 30 days I’ve implemented around 90% of how you manage a team in emergency medicine by accident and then applied the rest of it to it.

I’m quite happy with what they produce.

2) Yes, trying different models and harnesses through many providers (free/trial). mimo-v2.6-flash, minimax-m3.1-flash, glm-5.3-flash, deepseek-v4.1-flash, gpt-oss:120b, nemotron-3.5.-super-vl.120b-a12b, and others.

3) Mostly eca.dev on Emacs, and Claude Code at work. Now trying the OpenCode one too.

4) No.

5) No.

At work, I'm using Codex with the subscription they give me, and I don't really have anything to complain about.

I don't bother picking obscure tools and heavily configuring them since almost all of the intelligence is in the model, and models themselves improve so fast that any complicated setup will be obsolete in a few months. All of the useful behavior just gets trained into the models, and all useful functionality gets added into every harness very quickly.

I'm not using any personal agents since I don't see any use case.

Moved to lowest paid tier of Gemini, and liked it but it kept ignoring my instructions and putting in auto playing youtube videos (which also got saved to my youtube history). This pissed me off, after trying everything I just cancelled it

Currentrly on paid plan of Mistral. Not bad so far.

Sometimes I despatch it on open-ended tasks that I'd never take on otherwise; for example I have a little fleet of 10 agents digging up medieval Japanese Buddhist parables, translating them from scratch, and feeding them into a custom interface optimized for language study.

Most of the time I give it a moderately detailed description of the scope and key/unique features I want in a new project, and it banks on work from previous projects to know what sort of deliverables I want, track and review its own mistakes etc., then I steer it from a rough prototype into something more polished. I find it equally useful for coding/application development and research/synthesis tasks.

I sense more people will do so as you can fairly easily tailor any harness and MCP/LXC combo to suit the way you work. It's a bespoke future.

``` nix run nixpkgs#llama-cpp -- server --models-dir models -m models/gemma-4-12B-it-Q8_0.gguf --port 8080 ```

open http://localhost:8080.

I also run pi in a docker container to do some vibe agentic coding. But I prefer `cat flake.nix | pbcopy` and paste into the browser. Then I can export the jsonl files and use tools to convert them to md and push to GitHub Pages.

I can do most of AI sessions off-line and only need hotspot to sync with GitHub.

My main use case is to learn and hack nix on Mac. It is fun.

2) No. I try my best to use oauth

3) Claude Code + Custom Harness(set of skills) + Mod. This orchestrator (I call her as "Team Leader") orchestrates other machines with Tailscale. - I've used Claude Code (Opus 5.5) by model satisfaction and mod.

4) None

5) Dots and Instinct. Main use case is research, code search and raise issue, PR reviews.

2) I use Claude for all work and programming, ChatGPT for random questions in my day-to-day life.

3) I just use it through the CLI as it's my favorite interface, often with multiple CLIs running at the same time

4) Nope

5) Nope

Harness: when building/troubleshooting I use https://pi.dev TUI most of the time, the rest of the time is via an issue/PR driven workflow also powered by Pi with this action I built on top of its SDK: https://github.com/shaftoe/awesome-pi-coding-agent/

My general take on AI at https://a.l3x.in/ai

Generally speaking, I think I can hardly be happier than what I am already, the quality of open weight models is incredibly good and the only upgrade I could think of is being able to run one on my workstation one day (I don't even try on my Macbook Air M1), which isn't something crazy to dream about, perhaps in 2/3 years running Deepseek v4 Flash or similar model locally won't require too much of an investment in hardware.

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.

2) Not really, the value proposition on the subs are just so much greater.

3) I'm using Claude Code and Codex, crucially thru Muster[0] which I've been working on. It's a herdr inspired Libghostty-powered terminal which understands agents you're running, helps you manage them, supports remote devenvs, and it provides a CLI for agents to spawn, work, and message each other, no matter the harness and across machines.

4) I'm working on my own factory atm, which combines Muster and Kan[1] which is a offline, Kanban-as-plain-files-in-VCS project I'm working on and happens to work really well with agents. I recently added card dependencies to Kan and a kan ready command so I can have director agents orchestrate and hand out tasks based on what's ready and prioritized in Kan.

5) Not at this time. I played around with dots but I haven't been convinced it can do anything for me that my own solutions aren't better at.

[0] https://github.com/amterp/muster

[1] https://github.com/amterp/kan

My workflow is a windows terminal app with multiple sessions running under wsl2 in each pane since LLMs seem to do better with bash than PowerShell. I don't trust these things much so I've got a careful list of read only tool calls and filesystem sandboxing set up so it can do some useful stuff like read my task board and publish draft PRs without a ton of overbearing permissions prompts.

I usually chat with that for a bit on a task until it's plan sounds good then I have it spin up a Docker Sandbox microvm under Windows so it can safely run yolo mode and make all it's changes. When it's ready I carefully review and iterate on the result until it's ready to publish the PR.

Bit kludgy but strikes a balance of safety and multitasking I'm comfortable with. IME most folks don't think much about isolation so curious to hear if anyone else has a similarly isolated but better workflow. I'd like to try OpenShell instead of docker sbx but it lacks microvm support for windows and I don't want another layer of nested virtualization since my windows machine itself is a cloud VM.

Work also gives me access to GHCP for personal use so I use it for side projects too. Idk what I'd use if I had to pay out of pocket, probably something a cheap Claude plan. For noncoding personal use I mostly just use free tier Gemini. If this stuff ever slows down I'll invest in some GPU nodes for my homelab and run local models.

But I do use claude code tui because I have a sub: it is a good model and I like its aesthetics. If I could use the sub in my own harness I would. It's also a foil to GPT's models that overengineer everything.

I have a Codex subscription that I use in my own harness, dreamcoder.ai, which has a tiling window manager and all the other mod cons you'd expect a frontier harness to have.

In addition to that, I run Qwen 3.8 27B NVFP4 with ninfer on my 5090. It's a great model for local development. I also use that in dreamcoder.

2) No. The subscriptions are too much value compared to API. If i were to start using any model on API, the first one I'd consider would probably be Inception Mercury 3, for the 1000t/s speed.

3) I use my own custom kanban agent management tool named Kotkit, which I have been developing since March. It has a built-in multi window desktop which I can use from my phone as a PWA.

4) I am currently building orchestration/swarm capabilities into my tool. Currently adding multi-agent deep research and code review workflows orchestrated by my tool, so that they are cross-provider and my agents can trigger these on demand, as well as experimenting having one agent complete an epic ticket on the kanban board by orchestrating task agents (this is all wired up so AskUserQuestion and ExitPlanMode, etc. on the task agents are answered by the main agent, and if the main agent is unsure, it delegates to me). Currently doing it on a >20-task code migration epic with a lot of success.

5) No. AI is not yet good enough at long-term planning for these to be useful for real work. You have to build step-by-step up to it. These agent platforms are good for simple personal tasks, but to use them for actual work would be skipping a lot of steps.

Still figuring out how much should go in AGENTS.md though. Mine keeps growing lol.

I also have an OpenCode Go subscription, so I can keep an eye on the capabilities of the Chinese models.

Opus 5.5 medium for the vast majority of coding and code review tasks. I will sometimes save on tokens by dropping to sonnet if I have a well detailed plan built with opus.

I spend a lot of time on the design/architecture of features. These tasks are assisted by Gen AI but I still need to make a lot of corrections. It's my main bottleneck.

For orchestration and sandboxing I've used plain VMs (I have a make VM script which installs Claude in a fresh VM).

I've used Scion at work, which gave me a lot of ideas and got me excited about building a better orchestration, messaging, sandboxing and web UI thingy which I am currently working on (GitHub link in my profile).

My biggest pain point I wanted to address with my tooling is cleanly separating projects and accesses. I do a lot of web dev and sys admin stuff. I'm building Egzo so I can safely grant and monitor access to remote systems and cloud services and keep myself organized.

Opus 5.5, fast mode, xhigh/max reasoning, ultracode as needed. Usually 5-8 agents going at any given moment. In-house frameworks for Claw-like workflows and agent orchestration.

At home:

Cry

I use both Openrouter and OpenCode to get Kimi, GLM, big Qwen, etc, but not at great scale. I have a security product that consumes API tokens that I built against Opus 4 when that was the strongest available; when I get around to it I’ll likely shift it to prefer GLM or Kimi, slightly for cost but mostly for non-refusal.

I spend a lot of time in Claude Code because it’s the only Anthropic subscription-friendly harness. Additionally use OpenCode and codex. Not much time spent in pi these days. I used Aider before Claude Code’s beta. Claude Code’s plugin framework is pretty decent, so I tend to stand up a repo of custom plugins against every client repo I work with. It’s a nice efficiency layer for me up front and often grows into a bonus client deliverable after a couple months of refinement.

OpenClaw runs persistently, mostly for little calendar tasks and trying to mitigate my ADHD: energy level check-ins, redirects to use attention for things that matter. It orchestrates Hermes under the hood but I don’t interact with the latter directly.

I still mostly just use tmux directly and tell running sessions about each other, sending messages to each other via text files or send-keys/capture-pane. Herdr is installed but mostly unused. The GUI clients aren’t my thing; I’m a born console junkie.

What I really want to change next is pulling this all back into emacs.

https://github.com/8lamaster8/GIN

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.

I was unhappy with everything out there - not secure enough, not flexible enough, not composable enough, not nix enough. The whole concept how we use AI is garbage, having 10 terminals open with agents working in different branches. I build workflows, very complex, multi model, multi harness, parameterized - nix defined workflows that run in highly isolated, fully composed environments. I have a few dozen workflows already, in vx-maintainer: quick-fix, change-management, spec-implement, red-green, sync-branches, ....

Each of those workflows does something, and this extremely well. Every time a workflow fails, the workflow gets some massage to make it more resilient, more flexible, more correct. Workflows are usually design that restart just recovers the last state and continues work. My land-feature workflow has at least 40 steps, most of them deterministic scripts. For example, if rebase is true, a mechanical rebase is started, if this fails, an agent rebase agent is started. Full multi panel + review tool pipeline. With time, the workflows start to be super sophisticated, for example: review is cached, but the review is pinned to the commit hash. When restarted and rebase is on, a ast-diff is generated to check if the review can be reused. Stuff, no normal person would do :)

vx-maintainer has an own bug / change tracker. Normal bugtrackers are build for humans, such agentic system need a tracker that works for both.

Then I have a special agent, the queue-manager, his goal is to keep the workflow engine busy. He queries the vx-meta tracker for changes and workflows to get implemented.

Workflows are semi-automatic. You can have tty and ui programs running inside the workflows. You have decision steps and agents can ask the operator.

And this is just the surface of it.

I never was able to get so much stuff done and had so much fun getting a project build. And fucking safe - no more fear when updating dependencies.

2) No

3) Claude Code

4) Custom WIP https://muster.town/

5) Custom personal agent setup https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/miniclaw

Usage is mainly wiki building around personal info (finances, topics of interest), calorie counting, and doing various things from my dumb phone (rideshare booking, checking MTA Bus schedules, etc.)

2) yes, when claude starts getting too preachy and the task at hand is important to me i use openrouter + api + chinese models. my computer can't even run qwen 3.8 27b.

3) i use claude code because i think using other ones isn't allowed. i don't really like it, and generally prefer opencode (i've had to use it to do some things for my brother). i'll try using other ones though

4) no, and i didn't actually know they existed. opencode and claude code's agentic things are enough for me, though i don't do actually complex projects

5) no, i won't use them unless i get good local inference going (i.e. never).

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

2. Experimenting with qwen3-coder-next 80B and a few other local models for coding tasks on my M4 MBP (128GB RAM) - no other models or pay-as-you-go apis

3. I have a custom built setup primarily driven by claude code via telegram with a checked in "brain", a separate "watch" structure of crons that i can setup and tweak, and then a task farm run by that orchestrator with containerized cc (and a mixture of sonnet and local llms based on task) and application devcontainer stacks (if it's coding related)

4. Custom

5. Custom - mainly rebuilding the ideas from there into my own workflows, but not using any of them directly

Trying to split more things out of CC and use it as a pure harness on route to trying other harnesses out like pi, etc -- it's a work in progress as and when I have the bandwidth.

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

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

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

2 - No

3 - I use a lot of Opencode + Deepseek, strategize some of that work with Claude Opus, and some gtm, research, and project stuff in Hermes with its coding agent. When I guide by hand I use Orca Dev, which is lovely.

4 - Claude drops GitHub issues that Opencode picks up on a schedule. It’s simple and resilient enough for me. Hermes has a lot of scheduled tasks to move things forward.. it has gtm and research and dev loops (the latter builds autonomously for future projects vis a vis my attention, I’ve used quite a bit of it).

5 - Hermes Agent, which has become a core tech for me. I’ve tried to use Openclaw but it has not been something I can keep running. It spirals and crashes after a week in ways I’ve never experienced from Hermes, doing the same things. I have little interest in those generalist agents, maybe after a year.

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 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.

Had a Hermes set up with a dual NVIDIA DGX Spark and Deepseek v4 Flash, but then built my own harness (getcinnamon.ai) and pretty much switched to that 100% including family members.

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.

2. I have an OpenRouter $50 pay as you go API key that I use for Mercury 3 at this point, primarily for tokens per second. I also use GLM 5.3 when I inevitably get [cyber] blocked (or for reverse engineering in general, apparently) by the morality police at Anthropic.

3. I run things pretty stock. OpenCode with OpenRouter but otherwise I just use Claude code.

4. I've never used these, but I'm curious about them at this point.

5. Not yet, but also interested. My plan is to use Hermes for some personal agent work on a local model, but I have not set it up to test this yet.

Personal: OpenCode with my Deepseek API account.

Usually I do everything inside Herdr

In practice that means Duck.AI and Perplexity.

And the system clipboard.

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.

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?

Local Qwen and custom harness to experiment.

It has a 5 hour usage limit, and if using the wonder model, you basically only get 1 or 2 prompts. However, I find it will basically do unlimited 'turns', so as long as I give a good prompt, I can get my work done.

No ide/harness. I only do light coding and don't have time to actually sit at my computer.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

How do people handle this?

Do you keep everything in the same conversation thread?

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

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.

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.

When I write code with one, I use the other for peer review.

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

2) No.

3) None.

4) No.

5) No.

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.

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?

I feel I get a wild amount of value out of £90/mo (paid for via my apps revenue)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 use OpenCode to update my Home Assistant automations. Home Assistant also does two lightweight checks a day using gpt-5-luna (Look at this photo is the pool cover on or off?). I also use OpenCode for a few other small basic tasks.

This is me personally. At work I have a ChatGPT sub an a, seemingly limitless (I don't use it much tho) OpenAI API key.

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

------

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

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.

Herdr is awesome - it pings me when an agent is done or needs my attention and shows me all my terminal panes that are running an agent that I can access with one click.

I am now 90% Herdr terminal, open IDE maybe 1-2 times a day just for more convenient way to look at something. I searched ways to stay in the terminal - found lazygit and love it!

I use long-running worktrees (e.g. named worktree-1, worktree-2, worktree-3, ...) and have parallel work going on in them so I can work on whatever I want.

In each Herdr workspace, I have three tabs: 1st is for ~3 panes, one for Claude and two or more to run the app and basic terminal. Tab 2 for lazy git, and Tab 3 for an extra terminal when I need one. For example, right now I have ~20 Herdr workspaces open now between a few projects, multiple worktrees per project and a few across remote machines ready in case I need them. When in the zone, I might have 1-8+ agents working on completely different tasks.

I have a couple remote machines over SSH that I use when I need a task to run and I need to close my laptop.

I have a keyboard shortcut to init my workspace to that setup. lazygit is amazing.

I ask claude to do everything for me, for example: "Let's do it, open a jira ticket, assign to me and put into sprint. Fix it and open a pr"

I create artifacts all the time to share findings with team or as a checklist of manual testing I need to do.

I find that gh copilit does pretty good review on PRs, and I have a claude skill to go address all the copilot feedback (review, validate, reply, resolve, push changes if any were made).

I was on the 200/mo Claude plan but had to switch to the Team plan, so I pay 120/mo for two users and I swap to the 20 plan when I hit my 5hr limit on my 100/mo plan.

[1]: https://lexfridman.com/podcast -> DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux [2]: https://herdr.dev/

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.

2. No

3. Claude Code

4. My own engineering harness: https://devarch.ai/

5. No

I started using ChatGPT in the beginning then switched to Claude then Claude Code then developed DevArch over that entire time.

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.

2) No

3) N/A

4) No

5) No

2. deepseek api, local qwen/gemma on fw desktop

3. Claude & Pi

4. No 5. No

I'm basic "type what you want in prompt, read what comes out"

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.

I've moved all my ssh keys into a key-agent which prompts for key use as I got alarmed by claude attempting to login to remote systems to verify things as it worked through problems.

2) yea openrouter free models, usually nemotron coz they have decent availability and I don't get constantly rate limited like with the gemma models on there.

3) honestly still using the default IDE, used to use claude code cli but nowadays i just launch claude remote control and just talk to it through my phone.

4) something custom, i wired it all up in slack so i could easily talk to agents through the same place i do my work

5) Used to use openclaw on a raspberry pi to experiment with like autonomous development but i needed something with a bit more transparency so i moved everything into slack.

我是谁：一名做基础医学数据分析的博士研究生。

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.

2) pretty much just opus

3) claude code - but with Orca + app (being able to dev remotely via the app has been great for personal projects)

Work has me stuck with Cursor, which I don't find as good, even when using claude models.

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.

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.

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

I now use Muse as my primary agent and then spin up and manage Codex and Claude agents as needed on an Oracle server.

2) I have a 4090 which runs Qwen3.8-27b q4 fine with 180k ctx at q8. The model is capable enough to do things, but dumb enough to not be able to build elaborate nonsense like the bigger models love to do

3) I'm using https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler which is alright. It could be a bit less vibecoded (and the readme and docs and all would benefit from less LLM writing), but, generally, the opinions shaping it seem decent, and I like just how much control over and insight into what happens it gives you.

I initially tried OpenCode, and, holy hell, what a mess. Do not ever use OpenCode. I also tried goose but it was too agentic for my taste.

4) No. I am doubtful that that kind of workflow can produce software I would deem worthy of production. I also personally just dread the whole overhead that is tickets, jira, etc, so recreating the same but now you're the manager seems like a personal hell to me.

5) No. I wouldn't know what for

2. Kimi on OpenRouter, Abliterated.ai as needed

3. Claude Code (with all models), Claude Desktop, tried pi.dev, opencode

4. No

5. No

Main use case(s):

- Software applications

- One-off automations (calendar sync from scraped data, email alerts)

- Deep research and planning for personal stuff

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.

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.

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.

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

1) None

2) No

3) None

4) No

5) No

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.

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.

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

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

hard to contain myself not to change my setup too often (instead of doing actual work)

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 used to have the Pro subcription for Claude but switched recently to the equivalent Plus subscription for ChatGPT. With Anthropic, you cannot access their inference servers without going through one their client software or paying the API pricing. It is really annoying as those are two different product categories and I'd like to use the client of my choice with an LLM. OpenAI allows you to do that, so I have a proxy running on my computer which connects to OpenAI's servers in the back ground and serves locally a Chat Completions-compliant API, with the requests counting towards my subscription.

I also have an OpenRouter account, I use it regularly but mostly to explore new models and see what's out there. I wish I used it more but the bigger part of my requests, almost all of them, go through my subscription. My thinking is since I'm already paying for it, might as well use it. Which is a shame because it prevents me from exploring more.

I even think a combination of the free tier of Big AI with a pay-as-you-go pricing for more complex requests would actually be cheaper for most people than their current subscription, even with their heavily subsidized pricing. The problem is that most people wouldn't want to think of when they should go deeper with a bigger model and wouldn't want the mental task of switching. The same way people don't really switch thinking levels with a given model, even though it would be a more optimal use of their token pool.

There is a huge market for an alternative business model around LLM inference. The big providers will obviously go towards an ad-based model in the following years, which will be good enough for the greater public, but a lot of people and small companies would be interested in packages and subscriptions that suit their specific needs and lines of work. OpenRouter has a great product and there is so much possiblity in this space. I also believe there is so much potential in the development of models based on data primitives other than text or rasterized images, which would be really useful in a lot of industries.

For the frontend, I either use the web-based version of ChatGPT for quick questions and analytical work (the desktop version is unnecessarily heavy), or Open WebUI. For coding, I mostly use Zed. I like the traditional development environment and tooling, I tried several agent-first environments, but in the end I prefer an IDE on top of which agents were added. OpenCode Web has evolved a lot, I have been using it for quick scripting as well. I never use any coding agent TUI anymore. Behind the scenes, the agent harnesses are OpenCode and Codex. I use them interchangeably, I don't see much of a difference. Zed connects to OpenCode and Codex through ACP. Both OpenCode and Open WebUI connects to OpenRouter and the OpenAI Proxy. Open WebUI has Open Terminal, which I have been meaning to explore, for there to be less friction between any analytical work and a document that would be needed to be produced out of it. I also run small models through llama.app from time to time, when I want to be reminded how weak my computer is.

I don't use any orchestration tool. I don't have any work that involves so much volume that it would require that kind of setup. It's more important to me to maintain the right mental model, I don't want to risk any discrepancies between what I'm thinking and what's done. Therefore the agentic work must be single-threaded, if that makes sense. I also don't use AI chat gateways like OpenClaw or Muse because I don't want to do that work on my phone every minute of my life. I'm either working or I'm not.

This comment is longer than expected. It's such a fascinating and still evolving space.

2) Yes, Anthropic models usually, at work. Pay as you go API. Company is trialing limits, routers and open weight and even local models. Since the Anthropic 5.5 models none seem reasonable to use any longer (for now at least)

3) Claude Code at work. Tried Aider early on and it failed to even read its initial context (Claude models like a year+ ago). I dropped it dead after that - unusable if you need me to specifically "load" and point our files. That's not agentic coding, sorry. Have not used the actual features my IntelliJ Ultimate subscription provides in quite a long time, though I loathe to tell IT/finance that. I do use it from time to time to double check what Claude tells me. Used `pi` w/ local models (some gemma and qwen that'd run on my hardware. nothing usable w/ the work code base - or much anything for that matter, like I'd not even get through an interview coding challenge with that if you ask me)

Did use Codex maybe like 8 months or so ago to ping pong implementation plans and reviews between GPT and Anthropic models but then just stuck with Anthropic for some reason.

4) Nope.

5) Nope. But we do have our own in-house review agent and software factory agent. Like think CodeRabbit et. al.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

2. I use OpenAI/Anthropic APIs for various workloads (app features, automations, etc.), but not for personal inference/coding. Recently both of these providers started giving $200/mo in API credits, and OpenAI already gives free tokens, so I don't usually pay for this usage.

3. I always use the provider's preferred CLI: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Grok CLI, Kimi CLI, Antigravity CLI, Muse CLI. I use this with herdr to manage everything, and then a small custom app to keep track of my usages since I hit limits quite often.

4. No. Just the CLIs. For very large projects I've found Claude Code to be the best -- it can very easily manage many subagents.

5. I've tried OpenClaw, Hermes, Dots, and Muse. I really just haven't found great use cases for these tools

I use Claude & Codex for most of my personal coding/projects. For the other providers I mostly want to have broad experience with different models/harnesses. It's very interesting to see how each performs and what kind of tasks they do/don't excel out. The only con of having cheap plans is you really can only give them simple tasks.

---

At work I use AWS Bedrock w/ Anthropic + OpenAI models at API pricing. Each employee is given a rolling 28-day budget w/o access to Fable/Astra. I use the same Claude Code/Codex CLI + Herdr.

I spend about $5 a month with this setup.

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

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

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

2. GLM-5.3 and OpenCode for cybersecurity

3. Primarily custom built harness. Rust centric, heavy on the production engineering gates and a bunch of graph networks for context control.

4. Custom.

5. No.

My general ethos is that if taste is what is important going forward, my code generation must have it's own taste. If you can download my tooling off the shelf, I am replaceable by anyone who can do the same. My end goal is to drop Claude Code once the harness prices start to drift to API pricing. In the meantime, anything that can be automated into traditional and efficient code will be one more thing in my control regardless of future token prices. When I hit my limits for the week, I spend the remainder of the waiting time going over the framework data to see what are my largest sources of consumption and iterate in automating that more.

3) I use both Opencode and Pi.

I don't even understand how people can spend thousands of dollars a month on LLM tokens since I've accomplished multiple major projects with this setup. In general, Claude's better at frontend and debug and Codex is better at feature implementation and research from what I've found, which is why I have both.

2. No. GPT 6.1 Sol is very token efficient that I pretty much never run out before the end of the week anyways.

3. Default Codex/Claude app. I only use VS/VSCode to hand-edit/git sync things when needed.

4. No. Swarm is a waste of token imo, and a single good human in the loop beats any automated orchestration tool.

5. I find it unnecessary.

2. OpenRouter PAYG - glm or opus for most things

3. OMP or CC

4. Zellij/Vim — some things never change

5. No

2) I tried a local Qwen model but my poor old 1660 Ti did not enjoy it, and it wasn't all that useful.

3) I primarily use OpenCode running in a podman container for actually working on stuff. Also use the default free chats with Gemini 3.5 Flash for general searching, ChatGPT for brainstorming, and Claude to answer more code related things if they come up.

4) Nope.

5) Not at the moment. I've been eyeing using Hermes, but since I don't feel comfortable paying much at the moment I haven't really tried.

No

Codex

Codex

Dots

No other models or software.

Keeping it simple.

And I switch to Qwen3.8-27B (the Perplexity Pro version that works well with MLX-Serve) or GLM-5.3-Flash (sushi) when I need to do serious work offline.

As a general harness for coding, etc. I use Swival.dev . Configured to use Clef for model routing, with Qwen-35B-A3B for documentation tasks, Ornith to ask questions about code, and various GPT models from a ChatGPT subscription for more difficult tasks.

For music, pictures, etc. MLX-Serve is all I use, with the recommended models. It's really nice.

And as a general agent for research, etc. I absolutely love Perplexity. This is by far the AI produce I use the most, ever since it's been available.

It's a little bit sad that they are forcing people to use Perplexity Computer, because it's so expensive. But it works incredibly well.

Perplexity can now run locally, but even though they include the best Qwen3.8 quant in my experience, the Perplexity tool itself has major issues with context management and tool calling. So, when that doesn't work, I fall back to MLX-Serve and Swival with the Chrome MCP server.

For agentic web browsing, I can't live without Comet anymore. So many websites are painful to use, and finding the right buttons to click even to perform very common tasks is a challenge. So, I frequently just ask Comet to do it for me. I also use it to compare products, compare places on AirBNB, write personalized messages on Instagram, etc.

As for an OpenClaw-like tool, I'm using NBClaw. I was initially very excited about it. Look, I can just send messages on Signal and let the agent do work for me! And I occasionally found it useful to remotely fix issues on the host it was running on, or long tasks such as making sure that all my projects worked with a new version of the Zig compiler. It became a replacement for Perplexity because, hey, it's cool, everything's running locally, using my own web browser, etc.

But eventually, I used it less and less. Nowadays, I still enjoy the fact that it's sending me a summary of cool things it found in Hacker News and research papers on topics I'm interesting in. But that's pretty much it. I don't use it much for agentic tasks anymore. It still happens (I recently used it to fix a bug in an opensource project while I was on the bus), but mostly just only when I ran out of Perplexity Computer credits.

For my main work at my startup, we're very careful with how these are setup.

Everywhere else, I simmer in chaos.

I also have strong boundaries around generated prose. I don't like making other people read AI slop, but I don't mind having AIs read 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.

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.

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

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

4. tmux send-keys for messaging between panes.

5. No. Claude Code does that, too.

I've rarely been so inspired by a project.

It's publicly readable, but writable by a group of ~20.

https://magenta.cryptograss.live/

1. Claude Max (upsold me as of today); generally Sonnet 5.5 with the occasional Fable 5.1 when it gets stuck or I am executing a high value step; and Perplexity Pro (legacy).

2. Mostly local voice-to-text w/Parakeet Unified EN 0.6B via Handy[0] (awesome; use it!). Not for coding, but for note taking, AI interfacing, and general typing reduction and RSI avoidance.

3. None. I tried Pi and after much kerfuffle I don't like any of the harness interfaces. I find the type of work I do they are not very useful, because I often switch between variant approaches, planning, data, and don't want unrestrained context bloat.

4. No.

5. No.

I would add that I am very interested in obtaining good enough hardware to run this level of model locally at any pace, believe Qwen is basically there but too slow locally to use as a daily driver on my current rig, and can see myself making that investment in single digit years. Not right now, the hardware is overpriced for what it is versus venture funded cloud AI subsidies.

[0] https://handy.computer/

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.

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)

- 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

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.

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

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

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

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

- install vmware workstation pro

- turn internet off

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

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

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

- install w11 (keep a 100gb for vmware)

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

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

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

- voila you are done with w11 setup inside vmware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://github.com/ystyle/jvms

- pretty self explanatory

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

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

- install vscode/ visual studio whatever

- install codex

- install claude

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

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

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

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

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

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 have a Claude Code pro subscription, and mostly have Opus as a thinking buddy, we have thoroughly designed a data model together, we have implemented it in Django. Then we designed the RBAC system and now we are making views per role.

It is so intense! Constant decisions, walls of text with pros and cons to decisions. I mean the speed is amazing, the code quality is also amazing, but the amount of information I get to process is just insane, and I enjoy it less than the flow-state writing of code. I think I'll get used to it, and the speed is motivating, but man. I can not picture keeping 10's of agents on tasks. What am I doing wrong? Should I trust the system more? Or am I just mostly working on decisions now and the 1000$ token burners are not bothered with that because they have a full backlog, where I need to fill it myself?

I deal with the overload by making abstractions (a visual of the data model/db schema with color coded relations etc, a table for RBAC, think about permissions in "Axes"... I'm always looking for smart tricks to "think better", to be able to hold more information and reason about it. What must exist in me, what can I outsource?

Btw, as a FOSS person I so hate that I am not owning my means of production anymore, I have a home battery for all my infra, very proud of what I build, but I can't run my agents :( I really hope that will change soon (for privacy and for control reasons.) I pisses me off that I can't get nice hardware, meanwhile I can get a Muse or Dot, which is an LLM with a VM with up to 12 GBs of RAM, for free, paid for by their borrowed money. This whole idea makes me die a bit inside.

For the company I do all IT for we have a Mistral Team subscription, I find it hard to work with anything other than Claude Opus, I really force myself to do it but I often think: Pff, Opus would have gotten this right. But I remember feeling the same when I switched from Google to DDG (3000 years ago) and I never switched back. So it's probably just familiarity.

I also have HermesAgent on a nuc here in front of me, it makes small automations: Scans for positions or projects for my company, parses RSS feeds for relevant cybersecurity news, researches things when I ask, stores notes and articles with I can interrogate as a "body of work" <- love that btw, it's like an external memory where the faintest glimmer of a memory can help you dig up that one nugget of knowledge. Or you can find trends in TFAs you love. You can really get to know yourself a bit better. Most things it makes are LLMs out of the loop, just automations build from simple Unix-style tools that I could have made myself but never took the time for. It's also nice that it solves edge cases itself. It burns less then €3 a month on deepseek or so (just processing public data for me). I keep it on a separate vlan and away from important stuff.

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.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.