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My Agent Setup

chad.cm

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Re: My Agent Setup

#31

Post by Atotalnoob »

carimura wrote: post #9
whazor wrote: post #8

I am now on the MCP route, where I have lots of personally hosted MCPs. Including managing calender/e-mail. It does not cost too much effort to maintain MCP servers. No port forwarding or VPNs required thanks to OpenAI tunnels. And security wise its quite nice, since you have to activate MCP or give permission sometimes. So each chat is kind of isolated from each-other.

interesting.. does that bloat the context window? I imagine Hermes already struggles with context window size.. been meaning to look into that.

Skills and MCPs CAN bloat the context window. Some harnesses do more progressive loading of skills/mcp depending on how many you have. Check your harnesses docs.

Personally, I feel skills+CLI is better, since only the description of the skill enters the context window until it’s required and CLIs should support help flags which will allow you do have progressive discovery.

And a CLI is also easy to use yourself.

Re: My Agent Setup

#32

Post by carimura »

aliasxneo wrote: post #29

Have you thought about browser/machine use at all? I like the idea of Grok Bot but would rather host/maintain it myself with my own agents.

Not yet. The agents do have access to the web but not really a proper browser. Browserbase or equivalent is next on my list.

Re: My Agent Setup

#33

Post by messh »

carimura wrote: post #26
gchp wrote: post #23

Cool! How much does this setup cost you, roughly?

$48/month for the droplet (could probably be cheaper on Hertzner) and $100/month for OpenAI plan. so ~$150/month but again this could be cheaper with a different VPS and using Terra/Luna. I also have a claude max plan for coding but like I mentioned in the article coding is still separate from the agents.

[flagged]

Re: My Agent Setup

#34

Post by trollbridge »

carimura wrote: post #9
whazor wrote: post #8

I am now on the MCP route, where I have lots of personally hosted MCPs. Including managing calender/e-mail. It does not cost too much effort to maintain MCP servers. No port forwarding or VPNs required thanks to OpenAI tunnels. And security wise its quite nice, since you have to activate MCP or give permission sometimes. So each chat is kind of isolated from each-other.

interesting.. does that bloat the context window? I imagine Hermes already struggles with context window size.. been meaning to look into that.

Couple of notes on this

First, it matters how well the MCP is written; a well-written one won't be so massive

Secondly, different sessions should load different MCPs. Load only what is needed

Thirdly, if you're finding you need a dozen MCPs, you need to consolidate that into a single service that does the work and then presents a single, unified API (via MCP) to your agent

Finally, start using models with 1M context window limits. I really don't know how people can stand being stuck at a limit like 272K.

Re: My Agent Setup

#35

Post by avereveard »

tried similar setups in the past, but messages is just not my jam, so built a html wrapper on top of claude code and open code that runs on a small-ish instance. looks like this https://i.imgur.com/lj9Fgco.png (screenshot anonymized with chatgpt) and allows multiple conversation per project, and has a few conveniences like scheduled tasks. one of the project in the list is the project itself, so I can add features whenever.

Re: My Agent Setup

#37

Post by tln »

avereveard wrote: post #35

tried similar setups in the past, but messages is just not my jam, so built a html wrapper on top of claude code and open code that runs on a small-ish instance. looks like this https://i.imgur.com/lj9Fgco.png (screenshot anonymized with chatgpt) and allows multiple conversation per project, and has a few conveniences like scheduled tasks. one of the project in the list is the project itself, so I can add features wh…

That looks really useful

You haven't put this on github have you?

Re: My Agent Setup

#38

Post by lw18511811620 »

orangebread wrote: post #3

Very cool setup. I went down a similar path and while it is definitely cool to see the extent of how agentic AI can be, I agree the ROI isn't _quite_ there yet. I don't live in a world where I need to be constantly reading and replying to emails, so 95% of my inbox is just subscription spam. With development I need to be at the helm to design the planning requirements and actively make decisions before the agent goes…

I've landed on a similar conclusion building a much narrower tool: for messaging specifically, I don't think people want an agent that reads and sends on their behalf — they want the drafting to be fast, not the sending to be automatic. The moment you take the human out of the send button, the failure modes (wrong tone, made-up facts) become a lot more costly. Scoping down to "give me two good drafts, I'll pick and edit" turned out to be more useful day-to-day than anything closer to full autonomy.

Re: My Agent Setup

#39

Post by sublinear »

phplovesong wrote: post #21

I would never have the power to have AI just do everything. I like to create, not have some slop machine do whatever.

I have gone back and forth on a similar sentiment a few times. I settled on this: the only responsible use of LLMs is to fill in gaps.

It's fine as a search tool or autocomplete. It can be okay to generate code if you didn't know how else to get started, or you've already limited the damage it would do by your own design.

People who overuse LLMs are usually trying to compensate for their lack of experience, structure in their work, or dysfunctional teams. Anyone trying to get hired should recognize it as a new red flag attempting to cover up the old red flags.

Re: My Agent Setup

#40

Post by morkalork »

moribvndvs wrote: post #12

Not pointed at the author, but at the current state of affairs: this is fucking exhausting. We went and made a trillions-dollar market out of the bikeshedding maximization machine.

With Claude not only can you shave more yaks, you can build and run a yak farm and specialized yak-trimmer factory!
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