Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?
I'm curious how people on HN are using AI day to day, so I came up with a list of questions to get a gut feel. I ask about subscriptions and tiers, models outside those subscriptions (pay-as-you-go APIs, OpenRouter, local models), coding harnesses and interfaces, agent orchestration or swarm tools, and broader agent platforms. No need to answer every question—I just want to capture a snapshot of what people are using and why, since my own workflow has changed significantly from a year ago.
Right now I have Opencode Go Plus, Mistral Pro, Kimi. It changes. Kimi is not staying and I'm probably getting ChatGPT for a bit, last month I had Claude Pro. I stay around €100 a month total. I generally use open weight models but I use closed frontiers enough to stay up to date. 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. Pi all the way. 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.
It used to be more interesting and elaborate, switching between different models. I used to use Cursor, then Codex, but since Opus 5.5 came out, I just use the Claude IDE. I got rid of all my skills and just set it to medium. Then I vaguely talk to it about very high-end things that I want, and it comes back with magic. Rinse and repeat. I'd say the biggest trick is just to tell it what complete looks like. Be very specific about what you want it to come back with once it's done. That gives it a good idea what the goal is. It'll automatically create subagents and all that stuff. Although if you have money to burn and you're doing something large, you can tell it to just go wide or boil the ocean. Also, make sure you're working on at least five different things. Otherwise, you're sitting around for one agent.
Claude Ultra for personal, Claude Max for work, Codex $100/mo. OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Luna, and testing out models here and there. Claude Code and Codex for the respective subscriptions. Played with OpenCode and Pi some as well. I've tried a number of these tools and settled on my own tool (not released) to oversee my agents. Played with OpenClaw and Hermes in the past, cool ideas but execution fell flat. I currently use Dots and Duet for little things (mostly monitoring communications). Dots is much better than Duet today but I hope Duet gets better.
20$ Claude subscription. I used to have 2 20$ subscriptions but not anymore. My main model is Deepseek flash via the API. Claude Code CLI inside OpenShell. I like Claude Code's UX. Lots of custom skills and scripts. No orchestration tools. No broader agent platforms.
Moved to openclaw for everything, with occasional claude usage for tricky bits. I have $200 of both codex and claude subs. Openclaw is the answer to question "do X if Y happens". An agent per each type of Y channel manages the flow and memory. And user input is just another case of 'Y'. It is a very powerful model I am having lots of fun with it. the plumbing is a chore though, thinking of trying out grokbots to see if they solved it.