Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
I built a Qt GUI-based harness, Humbug, that runs on MacOS, Linux, and Windows (I have reasons to use all 3). Has only 3 runtime dependencies other than the Python standard library: https://github.com/m6r-ai/humbug

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.

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.

I find this works great as well. I try to do it on personal projects (without AI) with mixed success. Because it turns out I'm human. But when I started doing this on AI projects it made a huge difference. Features that I'd proposed and not implemented were picked up by the model and cross-cutting considerations were raised. Just insane how that raised overall output quality.

{"deleted":true,"id":50376442,"parent":50376262,"time":1793865828,"type":"comment"}