Ask HN: What do you currently use for AI coding (personal or professional)?

2 points by joelthelion 28 days ago | 5 comments

Given how quickly things evolve, it's easy to get lost in the numerous offerings and hard to get the best deal. So, what do you use? Both clients/harnesses and LLM providers or local setups would be interesting.

Personally, I've been using opencode with Github copilot for work. I'm currently looking for cost-effective provider for personal work. Maybe openrouter with one of the cheap models?

kstenerud 28 days ago |

Opencode can be connected to Qwen for coding grunt work. It's pretty decent, but I prefer to use Claude. Less mistakes, better for reasoning architectural decisions with the agent checking against the existing codebase and documentation. I also keep things sandboxed in yoloAI for peace of mind and to eliminate permission fatigue.

joelthelion 28 days ago | |

Do you pay for the model? Or run it locally? If so, which hardware do you use? Is it fast?

kstenerud 28 days ago | | |

I use an RTX 3090 with 24gb on it, which can comfortably fit https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B. It's freely downloadable, so you only pay for the gfx card and the electricity. There are also plenty of models out there that work well on Apple unified memory.

But mostly I just use Claude now since I already have a max subscription. I've done hybrid setups in the past where I had Claude do the hard stuff and a local LLM do the code monkey stuff, but with the right optimizations I'm no longer hitting the Claude token ceiling.

aadilghani 27 days ago |

Cool to see more people building phone-first agent control. I've been working on the permission layer side of this same problem. One thing I learned: session management and permission approval have very different latency requirements. Sessions you check every few minutes. Permission requests need sub-second response or your agent sits idle burning tokens. Push notifications > browser polling for that reason.