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teekert | on: Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?
Ok I don't understand how people can deal with the information coming from a fleet of agents burning 100s-1000s of €/$ as month.

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.

laurasg | parent | next
I don't think you are doing anything wrong; it is overwhelming. But I also don't think "trusting" the system more would help. IMO, now coding is a bit more like maintaining critical infrastructure; it may be built quickly, but you need to keep an eye out for random decisions agents are taking that will cost you (money, security...) in the future. I have seen Claude making many sneaky decisions and (maybe) coincidentally burning more tokens by doing so
Kwpolska | parent
You use Claude as a "thinking buddy", meanwhile those who spend $500+ on LLMs have shut their brains off, and have delegated all thinking to the LLM, producing tons of slop.