Discover how people work with AI, and follow what changes. Explore their setups and share your own.

251 points•steveybrown•14 days ago•140 comments•
I kept seeing engineers share what they were building with AI; however, I was always more curious about how they worked. Which agents did they use? What skills and tools had stuck or been thrown out the window? How did they manage longer-running tasks? So I built this with the hope we could have a dedicated space to share and be open about our setups.

140 comments

vegadw13 days ago
This feels self-selective to how some people work, because it requires using MCP to contribute.

I'm a reasonably heavy AI user, and have some custom skills/MCP servers I'd share, but there is no way in hell I'm connecting to some arbitrary MCP server and connecting my Github account to it. Noppppeeeee.

xnx13 days ago
Agree. I was going to type in my setup, but no way I'm touching the instructions on https://mysetup.ai/connect. Also I don't use Codex, Claude, or Pi.
steveybrown13 days ago
Thanks for checking out, I've added support for manual entry without MCP: https://mysetup.ai/connect

No Codex, Claude, or Pi... now you have peaked my interest with your setup :P

mixtureoftakes13 days ago
There has to be a much better way to share your setup
tripleee13 days ago
From my years of watching people casually `curl randomsite.com/install.sh | bash` you might be a minority there
steveybrown13 days ago
Fair point, MCP contribution was always optional, although not obvious. I've updated it to make manual contributions outside of MCP more prominent
Retr0id13 days ago
Maybe I'm missing out, but I've never used a single MCP, ever.
oxi11313 days ago
I recommend using spotify mcp server (if you use spotify), it freed me from the loop of listening to the same stuff again and again :P
taude13 days ago
I use almost zero MCP servers. I do vibe a bunch of custom CLI tools with minimal access to do the things that support my workflows. Been happily integrating with all-the-things, while my companies MCP server connectivity changes daily based on security posture and firewall configs, etc....
rtvn8313 days ago
I don't use any MCP servers except for Figma!
abyssknight13 days ago
I stopped reading after "Ask them on X", but contribution by MCP just compounds on the issue.
lbrito13 days ago
My local setup: I begrudgingly open `claude` on a terminal, hate it for 8 hours, then turn off my computer and forget it exists. Rinse and repeat
DerArzt13 days ago
Who told you how I work? I thought it was a closely guarded secret?
ivanjermakov13 days ago
"Industry standard"
brumbelow12 days ago
Peak efficiency
hackmack1013 days ago
20 year industry vet here. Yeah, no thank you. In the age of AI, developer productivity and job security will involve your proprietary workflow. It no longer makes sense to share your knowledge with the world.

I'd highly advise people don't do this.

yokoprime13 days ago
I've also worked 20 years in the industry, and if feel completely the opposite. Having a great setup and pipeline that works for you is a huge plus, but nothing can replace the intuition and knowhow you have built up with experience. Sharing is still caring, and we should not stop caring
hackmack1013 days ago
Serious question, why? Nobody gives a fuck if I'm out of a job, especially OpenAI and Anthropic. They stole the worlds knowledge to put us out of a job and arguably took away what it means to be a human. Why should I contribute anything more to that?

Solving hard problems will be the only thing that separates you from others. Your mindset and tools should be a trade secret at this point.

ingsoc7913 days ago
6 months ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly with you. Lately however I've observed coworkers vibe coding massive band-aids over broader architectural issues in our codebase without any prior context.

They have no understanding of (nor any desire to understand) what they're doing, but they are being given kudos by management for their "initiative" to solve the organization's "big problems." Guess who will be asked to clean up the mess if (when) it blows up.

It's getting cheaper and cheaper to kick the can down the road, and standing in front of that risks making you look like a dinosaur. It's going to be an interesting few years...

corv13 days ago
I'm also tending towards the generous stance:

1. The value of software is tending towards nil while it's ever easier to tailor bespoke solutions.

That suggests to me that I'm losing less by sharing, and it's probably not even going to be taken wholesale and kept verbatim.

2. The labs have already trained on everything and will keep on doing so.

Therefore continuing to contribute to OSS doesn't just benefit my own future self but the entire ecosystem.

(Yes, I need to get over how it appears a select few are making off with the lion's share but that only differs in degree in comparison to the past)

At least now the cards are being shuffled elsewhere...

twKrash13 days ago
completely agree. Same 20 years in the industry
mystifyingpoi13 days ago
Two years ago, I'd consider this attitude as ungrateful. Today, this attitude is 100% correct and I slowly start to be like that.

People might think I'm a dick, I don't care, my tools, my knowledge, my job security. I actually recently thought of nuking the entire IaC setup and go back to shell scripts on random virtual machines. Too bad that Claude can figure things like that out pretty easily. Well, the world sucks now.

zormino13 days ago
I've landed here as well, but by force. I've actually tried to share some of the productivity and workflow tools I've built with AI that help automate portions of my work, specifically on target firmware debugging, and everyone at work just...ignored it. Didnt care. Of the small number of people who even stopped to look, a few of them were actively negative. Maybe I didnt sell it hard enough, but my job isnt to sell productivity tools internally (or even make them, i did it for myself). So, I'll keep making myself more productive and build tools for myself. And everyone else will just have to figure out their own path. I tried to help, but oh well.
strgcmc13 days ago
I can appreciate why you'd come to this conclusion, but may I offer one idea that I think you've potentially overlooked?

Unless you are a solo founder running your own company by yourself (in which case ignore the rest of this comment!), then your fundamental job security is likely to be predicated on the survival of your company as well as the survival of your own individual job itself.

From the company-survival POV, all companies are engaged in competition (unless they have a total monopoly).

Therefore I ask you to consider the competitive scenario, of whether a competitor to your company who adopts a more collaborative culture, might be more likely to outcompete your company (assuming everyone you work with in your own company adopts a similarly "dick"-ish stance, to use your own words), and therefore you lose your job due to being out-competed, rather than due to internal politics or due to a failure to guard your personal expertise?

Maybe you say -- I don't care if my company is out-competed, I'll just get another job. Ok fair enough, but might it not be possible that, in a future job interview, they may ask you for examples of collaboration? And if you commit to a monk-like devotion to solitude and privacy, then maybe you are undercutting your own future hireability?

There are no free lunches [1]. By optimizing for one thing (what you view as protecting yourself), you might be sabotaging another dimension (your company's overall competitiveness, or your future hireability).

Anyway, nobody knows shit about shit. I certainly don't pretend to be an authority, but I would caution you to avoid coming to a hasty conclusion, especially since it seems emotions are involved and possibly clouding your judgement. You may also consider whether this decision to protect yourself in this way, is in itself a premature (micro?) optimization of a sort, and if whether you might be failing to optimize on a more macro level.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch

bbor13 days ago

  People might think I'm a dick, I don't care, my tools, my knowledge, my job security.
If you're feeling ponderous, I'd ask you to consider the outlandish hypothetical that this doesn't win you meaningful[1] job security, and you end up in the same bucket o' crabs as the rest of us. Would you regret your current actions?

[1]: anywhere from the fathomable "my harness didn't come up in my layoff email nor in any of my failed interviews following that" to the realistic "the entire concept of employment shifted under our feet so quickly and so profoundly that a dash of solidarity & luck outweighed even the shrewdest preparations".

qurren13 days ago
Exactly this. I've worked hard year after year, paid too much taxes, and still haven't gotten job security in return. Living costs are still rising.

No thanks to sharing anything for free.

Maybe once I have retirement levels of money, and when I'm not actually working for the money, I'll be interested in sharing.

bbor13 days ago
You should check the provenance and licenses of your dependencies -- I bet there's a few irrational gifts in there from the nerds in the "open source" community ;)

Or, in SVese: are you a taker or a maker?

deadbabe13 days ago
Exactly. In fact, hiring may be conducted almost entirely based on what kind of tools and skills you build that no one else really has access to.
skinnychef12 days ago
Well, not a dev here, so my primitive setup is to have an alias in my .bashrc that launches firefox with the prompt added to the Google AI mode, so all I have to do is Super+T (terminal), type 'ai' followed by my query. For laughs, this also allows to bake in response styles:

  query="$*"
  base="Respond like Dr. House, do not hold back the profanities; "
I also have an even shorter alias for '?' using fabric that answers right in the same terminal, that I learned from Mischa Vandenburg:

  echo "$*" | fabric --model gemini-2.5-flash --pattern ask_ai
that one I use my own API key so it costs some small amount per use.
demeyer113 days ago
It’s called Autobot, it’s designed to get as close as I could reasonably get to a real world Iron Man Jarvis.

WHAT IT DOES

OSS/MIT Harness that helps agentic tasks run for up to 4 days using without performance degradation. Designed to work really well in native, conversational voice mode. Does a good job with knowledge work, managing computer use “leases” in a way that avoids conflicts across sub agents.. or deploying an entire AWS infrastructure pattern from zero and launching 100 different VM images.

HOW IT DOES IT

Uses a canonical event ledger, heartbeat (for persistence by low cost orchestration), extends foundation memory to encrypted disk storage, and manages its own scheduling system (easier to switch to another platform).

Installs as a project, so very easily. Zero config. No special app, access needed.

Accompanying repos have the skills to disable approvals inherent to the foundation models (use with caution, not advised - separate repo under parent).

BENCHMARKS

Currently top of AssistantBench Leaderboard; and, benchmarked at the top of OS World 2.0, the hardest knowledge work computer use benchmark I could find, using a model that is one generation behind. All benchmarks in repos with cryptographic seals.

Entirely free, nothing to sell - it’s been a game changer for me, so I’m just putting it out there.

Hoping to find others also working on pushing this particular dimension of harnesses forward.

CHECK IT OUT

https://github.com/demeyer1/Autobot/graphs/traffic

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